A short story is a single movement with a single climax which “by the rule of elegance and efficiency” should contain the fewest scenes possible—perhaps three. The short story moves to an “epiphany,” as Joyce said—in other words to a climactic moment of recognition or understanding on the part of the central character or, at least, the reader—achieving its effect by fully justifying, through authenticating background, its climactic event or moment.
The novella can be defined as a work shorter than a novel (most novellas run between 30,000 and 50,000 words) and both longer and more episodic than a short story. The novella usually has a series of climaxes, each more intense than the last, though it may be built—and perhaps in fact ought to be built—of one continuous action. The novella is a single stream of action focused on one character and moving through a series of increasingly intense climaxes. It goes through a series of small epiphanies or secondary climaxes to a much more firm conclusion (than the short story) wherein the world is, at least for the central character, radically changed. This is a focus that lends itself to neat cutoffs, framing. Nothing can be more perfect or more complete than a good novella. The chief beauty of a novella is its almost oriental purity, its elegant tracing of an emotional line. A good novella has an effect analogous to that of a tone poem in music.
The novel has an effect more like that of a Beethoven symphony. It imitates the world in all it’s complexity; we not only look closely at various characters, we hear rumors of distant wars and marriages, we glimpse characters whom, like people on the subway, we will never see again. Too much neatness in a novel kills the novel’s fundamental effect. A novel is like a symphony in that its closing movement echoes and resounds with all that has gone before. This is rare in the novella; the effect requires too much time, too much mass. Toward the end of the novel, the writer brings back—directly or in the form of his characters’ recollection—images, characters, events and intellectual motifs encountered earlier. Unexpected connections begin to surface; hidden causes become plain; life becomes, however briefly and unstably, organized; the universe reveals itself, if only for a moment, as inexorably moral; the outcome of the various characters’ actions is at last manifest; and we see the responsibility of free will. It is such closing orchestration that the novel exists for. If such a close does not come, for whatever theoretically good reason, we shut the book with feelings of dissatisfaction, as if cheated. This is of course tantamount to saying that the novel, as a genre, has a built-in metaphysic. And it does. The writer who does not accept the metaphysic can never write a novel. The reader believes in an orderly universe that imposes moral responsibility, the novel must reflect and reinforce this belief. The novel is elegant and efficient; that is, it does not use more scenes, characters, physical details, and technical devices than it needs to do its job.
