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“The novella,” Ian McEwan writes, “is the perfect form of prose fiction.” And yet, McEwan laments in his short essay, ‘Some Notes on the Novella,’ published in The New Yorker last October, an overwhelming number of writers find themselves “slaves to the giant” i.e. the novel – “instead of masters of the form.”
Not so Jen Michalski.
Michalski, a Baltimore-based writer and editor, knows exactly what she is doing when it comes to choosing form to suit a particular narrative function. The author of two short story collections, From Here, and Close Encounters, her first novel, The Tide King won the 2012 Big Moose Prize and is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press this spring. In the meantime, last month Dzanc Books released Could You Be With Her Now, a stunning pair of disparate but resonant novellas that showcase not only her enormous range but also the form in its tidy splendor.
While on the surface these works seems worlds apart, emotionally the characters are united by loss, alienation, and their desire to be understood. At the center of it all is Michalski’s masterful hand, at once compassionate and unflinching, possessed of extraordinary, aesthetic restraint. What she has given us are two lean bodies of incredible depth and ambition. Compression wins out at every turn, so that each word feels integral, without sacrificing her tremendous ear for language. The umbrella title for the two novellas, Could You Be With Her Now, comes from a line in the second pertaining to a fleeting, fiery romance with a lover, long dead, and speaks to the ache of impossible love, a current that runs through both stories. Both novellas hinge on the feeling, expressed by Alice, a character from the second novella, May-September:
Something had been lost, or taken, or was never hers to begin with, even though she realized with a ferocity that she had wanted it more than anything.
The first novella, I Can Make it to California Before It’s Time for Dinner, is driven by an unforgettable voice. Jimmy Debrowski, a mentally-challenged 15-year-old pines for a TV star named Megan. Fed up with watching Jimmy moon for Megan on screen and eager to change the channel, Josh, his older brother pushes him to the door, “Why don’t you go find her?” Literal Jimmy does as he’s told.
Filled with wonder and longing, Jimmy must navigate a hostile outside world on his disorienting hunt for connection. Accidentally, he kills a teenage girl, whom he mistakes for his beloved celebrity. He doesn’t realize it, of course, but the death sets up a chain of events that eventually leads him to a doped up truck driver with a penchant for boys. Inevitability steers his path, at once awful and irresistible. The reader cannot look away; the reader is helpless to defend this kid whose heart swells for simple pleasures, like fast food and pajamas with army men on them. To Michalski’s credit, she manages to create moments of levity along the devastating road. To see the world through Jimmy’s eyes is heartbreaking and startlingly beautiful: “I am happy. I am riding in the truck. Maybe if I’m good Mr. Ed will let me honk the horn again.”
Perhaps most admirable are Michalski’s razor sharp instincts. Another writer might create a voice that flirts with overkill or falls into type, or get carried away indulging some of the more disturbing moments. Michalski is not some other writer. Everything that emerges from her controlled pen is in direct service to her story, revealing her deep understanding of the ever-fragile human condition. Above all, she reels in her narrative at the right spot, ending the novella before it’s over, leaving her readers reeling, rooting for Jimmy, with just the slightest of openings through which to hope for his future.
The voice shifts dramatically in May-September. Told in alternating chapters of third person points-of-view between Sandra, a 67 year-old widow, and Alice, a twenty-something writer, hired by Sandra to record her memoirs, the overall tone is quieter, the writing more lyrical. Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway makes a brief cameo here, and you can see why, as the opening to May-September, “Alice would come shortly” calls to mind Woolf’s opening, “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.”
Unlike the chase pace of I Can Make It to California Before It’s Time for Dinner, Michalski’s second novella slows things down, centering on the bloom of an unlikely relationship. What brings Sandra and Alice together are Sandra’s stories. Hers was a life of gimlets, country clubs, affairs, marital discontent. “Jack did not know that Sandra could already cook a rack of lamb in the Maytag in fifteen minutes but that she had chosen not to. With the right equipment, perhaps he thought, she would be blissfully happy. Or pretend to be.”
As Alice begins to record Sandra’s past she finds herself falling into her narratives.
Sometimes when Alice closed her eyes, she saw the woman in Sandra’s pictures. She kept one picture in her bag, close to her. In it Sandra was sitting under an umbrella at the beach, a cottage behind her. Southampton 1967. Her legs were tucked under, firm and tan, her hair spilled over her shoulders, and her cheeks scrunched into a smile Alice was in love with that woman.
Sandra spreads her life out over the table, and Alice is taken with it all: “black and white, color bright, and faded. Torn edges, pin holes in corners, cigarette smelling, coffee splattered.”
Likewise, lonely Sandra becomes increasingly interested in her young scribe. A passionate classical pianist, Sandra claims music an unconditional love, the way she imagines writing would be for Alice. What did Alice write about? Sandra wanted to know.
[Alice] wrote about parents dying, lovers dying, pets dying, dreams dying, seasons dying, night dying, day dying. And sometimes children were born and sometimes dreams were born and days were born and certainly nights. Sometimes love was born.
Sandra lived once but no longer lives until Alice arrives on the scene and gives her a new lease on life, one rife with hope, if only briefly. That Sandra should find herself in love again, at her age, with a woman less than half her age, is at once a shock and a dream. Who would have thought it possible? From the slow build to romance and eventual heartache, the prose is gorgeous, the dialogue fluid, flashbacks crisp and tautly woven, the pacing spot-on.
Until the last few years I’d read only a handful of novellas- classics by dead white men, included on every syllabus, plus the playful trio by Stanley Elkin, but little else, and certainly no such works by contemporary writers. However, recently I’ve enjoyed a number of stand-out novellas by young writers: Emma Straub’s Fly-over State, Daniel Torday’s The Sensualist, and Matthew Salesses’ The Last Repatriate, to name a few, have won my affection for the form as a refreshing, no-bullshit zone. I don’t know whether the novella is experiencing any kind of resurgence, but I relate to its pared-down appeal. When done well, as McEwan writes: “the demands of economy push writers to polish their sentences to precision and clarity, to bring off their effects with unusual intensity, to remain focused on the point of their creation and drive it forward with functional single-mindedness… They don’t ramble or preach, they spare us their quintuple subplots and swollen midsections.” In Could You Be With Her Now, Michalski accomplishes all this and much, much more- with seemingly effortless grace.
Sara Lippmann is a 2012 New York Foundation for the Arts Fiction Fellow. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Valparaiso Fiction Review, Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood, Used Furniture Review, Our Stories, Joyland, Slice Magazine, Potomac Review, Big Muddy and elsewhere. She co-hosts the Sunday Salon, a monthly NYC literary series, and lives with her family in Brooklyn. For more, visit saralippmann.com.