A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me
By David Gates, Knopf, 314 pages, $30
Specimen
By Irina Kovalyova, Astoria, 295 pages, $19.95
If there is a single prose genre more maligned by the reading public than the short story, it is the novella. Difficult to define and almost impossible to categorize, novellas are approached by readers with suspicion or outright indifference, whereas publishers treat the genre like a contagious disease. It's hard even to tell what precisely a novella is. Is it a long story? A short novel? This hybrid genre contains properties of each and, although it is home to some of the most enduring fiction in the Western canon – The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Heart of Darkness, The Metamorphosis – it remains something of a curiosity, like an exotic museum piece.
Although there are publishers – Melville House in the United States, Quattro Books here in Canada – that remain steadfast in their seemingly thankless commitment to publish novellas, most avoid the form at all costs, except perhaps as digital singles where they can charge a modest $2.99 for them. If they appear in print at all, it is usually bundled into collections of stories, in the manner of two selections from new books by veteran American writer David Gates and debut Canadian author Irina Kovalyova.
What is at least as interesting as these authors' desire to include novellas in their new collections is their respective attitudes toward placement. Gates puts his long story, Banishment, right at the beginning of his book, whereas Kovalyova reserves hers, called The Blood Keeper, for the end. This is not an idle decision, as it provides the respective volumes with discrete rhythms and reading experiences. By opening with his novella, Gates offers his reader an almost languorous entrée into the volume, while at the same time announcing his key themes. Kovalyova, by contrast, sets her work up as a series of overtures before the main operatic piece, which runs fully half the book's length.
Each approach has its merits. In Gates's case, this mostly involves the novella being our first experience of the stories in A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me; we have not yet had a chance to develop a weariness with both the length of the collection as whole and a kind of repetitive thematic chime that rings throughout.
Gates's pervading subject is people of a certain age – men, mostly, though there are a handful of women protagonists here, too – behaving badly in the arena of love and sex. Banishment is one of the pieces with a woman at its centre, a mid-30s Yale graduate from New Jersey who has toiled in a series of thankless journalistic endeavours because, as she puts it, "we can't all be Naomi Wolf." While working (at the age of 30) as a fact-checker for Newsweek, she meets a writer three years her junior, who speaks Spanish and comes decked out with "a flat stomach and male-model stubble." Her first thought is, "Maybe one time with him just because I can, if I can." Reader, she marries him.
There follows a second marriage, this time to a much older man, "a once-almost-famous" architect in his 60s. This relationship takes up the bulk of the novella, and it sets the tone for much of what is to come in the rest of the book. The woman is pitiless in her attitudes toward her two lovers, although she does admit to feelings of guilt over abandoning her first husband for the architect (she had previously lured the former man away from the "nice girl" he had been seeing at the time). But what is most telling is the portrayal of the architect. An amateur musician, he is an aging aesthete, who introduces his young paramour to the jazz of Bill Evans and, as a child, lived in a house where Saul Bellow and Ralph Ellison were regular dinner guests. He also drinks too much and is surpassingly vain, doing his own laundry not out of any male feminist impulse (as his soon-to-be wife at first suspects), but to hide the stains from his incontinence.
Here we encounter the chime that resounds throughout the book: Gates's men are all aging and confronting, in one way or another, mortality and the consequences of a lifetime of bad decisions; yet, they all still manage startling success with women, who remain surprisingly available to them, and who don't seem disappointed by any diminishment of capacity in the area of sex (although, admittedly, this does become an issue for the architect). A few stories of this type might be fine – and Gates is nothing if not a fine and subtle writer on a line-by-line basis – but the sheer preponderance of them does grow tiresome over the course of the entire book.
Similarity of material does not plague Specimen, which features a startlingly diverse array of stories in an array of different styles. Gdansk is presented as a numbered list; Peptide p takes the form of a scientific paper investigating a childhood disorder known as "Heart Break Disease"; The Big One, about a mother and child trapped under a parking garage that collapses in an earthquake has its second half broken down into two parts that run contiguously on either side of the page.
These stories are interesting for their formal experimentation, but too often they come off as a kind of MFA writing-class exercise: "Now tell a story in the form of a scientific report." Stronger by far are the stories like Gonos (the best of the collection) or the title story, in which the author dispenses with the gimmickry and just allows her tale to unfold naturally. Too often, her more self-conscious conceits end up sabotaging themselves, as in The Ecstasy of Edgar Alabaster, which for most of its duration reads like a second-rate and clichéd plagiarism of A.S. Byatt's Angels and Insects. That there proves to be a reason for this does not diminish the reader's frustration at being duped.
As for Kovalyova's own novella, it takes place mostly inside the shadowy North Korean state, and follows a young female botanist who goes initially to study orchids at the request of her father, who is living there, but ends up falling in love with a Korean man whom she determines to spirit out of the country. If the stories preceding it served as vocal warmups, the novella allows Kovalyova the opportunity to indulge in some full-throated operatic melodies, and she takes advantage, moving from the introductory stages, with their carefully calibrated feel for a foreigner's disturbed perplexity upon arriving in North Korea, to a story of forbidden love to a fast-paced flight narrative. Not all these elements work equally well, but by the end a reader is willing to forgive the author her overreach: such a varied collection testifies to a roaming imagination and willingness to push the boundaries of form and technique.
Steven W. Beattie's column on short stories appears monthly.