The Return of the Novella?

Why is the novella such an intriguing and attractive fictional form? Because it's perfect for our shrinking attention spans.

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But what is a novella anyway? Page count provides the only broadly responsible definition: roughly 60 to 120 pages of prose fiction, or as Melville House succinctly puts it: “Too short to be a novel, too long to be a short story….” More often than not, though, the novella can be called something else too: fiction's most open-ended and compellingly discursive form. As in a short story, plot isn't paramount, but, without the story's demanding confines, there's room to wander. That means novellas are often structurally syncopated (think of the masterly changes of tempo in Joyce's The Dead), and their effect tends to be not instantaneous but cumulative: Read any two pages of Lin's Shoplifting at American Apparel and you'd likely set it aside; read the whole thing and its strange sadness will overtake you. The novella has ambivalence built into its DNA. It's neither one thing nor the other and tends to make you think even as it lures you down blind alleys and serves up irresolute endings.

If that sounds like hard work—well, sure, sometimes a novella's pleasures have to be earned. That's certainly true of Jean-Christophe Valtat's 03, a novella consisting of the arresting and round-about musings of a rebellious suburban teenager by one of France's rising literary stars. Published there in 2005 and discovered in a Paris book shop by FSG editor Lorin Stein (who commissioned an English translation, appearing in paperback this month), 03 is a single paragraph that runs for 85 pages, a young man's simultaneously punkish and Proustian meditations on his attraction toward a mentally disabled girl at a bus stop. I had to read 03 twice to follow what was going on, but in the end Valtat's novella radiated an unexpected tenderness that has lingered with me. It's the most original and evocative portrait of the adolescent mind I've read in years.