WHAT GREAT WEIGHT AND POWER COME IN SUCH SMALL PACKAGES

Author: By Anita Shreve

Date: SUNDAY, November 2, 1997

Page: N4

Section: Books

Weighing in at only 197, 170, 184, and 181 pages respectively (in my own hardcover editions), each of them is a singular event of unbroken completeness. I can read a short novel in a sitting and experience it as a whole, in the same way I might watch a film or have a dream. In short, I hold in my hand the possibility of perfection.

A short novel cannot allow itself the rambling, over-the-top magnificence of a Thomas Pynchon or a David Foster Wallace, nor can it chronicle the decades-long sagas of ``In the Beauty of the Lilies'' by John Updike or the more recent ``Underworld'' by Don DeLillo; but neither are they anemic slices of life. Although brief, the short novel can have weight: the weight of a civil war in Northern Ireland, for example; or the weight of a lifetime of repressed, hardscrabble New England passion. Perhaps this weight is simply a function of mathematics, of ratio of words to story, creating a satisfying density of emotion and thought per page. There is, in a good short novel, not a single excessive syllable, not an ounce of fat. Indeed, for me, the power and beauty of such a book derives, as poetry so often does, from its very leanness.

Oh, the pleasure of standing before a bookshelf and discovering a ``Lies of Silence'' (1990), a satisfyingly slim volume as well as a quietly brilliant tale. In Moore's book, a Belfast hotel manager unwittingly becomes a critical pawn in an unfolding IRA attack on a Loyalist politician who will shortly dine in the hotel. Held hostage by four masked and jumpy youths who have broken into his house, Michael Dillon is forced to make an agonizing choice between the lives of a dining room full of innocent graduation celebrants and an outspoken and irritating wife he no longer loves and plans to leave. The novel moves fast, without digression, and comes to its unexpected ending rather like a car squealing its brakes before a stop sign. Shaken, this reader sat with the book open to its last page for quite some time, savoring the uniquely delicious punch that could not have been delivered by a longer work.

Also from Northern Ireland (and also trim and paradoxically weighty) is ``Cal,'' the MacLaverty classic about an urban Catholic boy who unexpectedly falls in love with the widow of a Protestant policeman he helped to assassinate. Does Cal dare to approach the beautiful Marcella, whom he sees one day at the library? And having made the approach, does he then dare to love her without confessing his complicity in the death of her husband? MacLaverty is a master at producing lean sentences that unflinchingly evoke class, vulnerability, and fear. ``Cal closed his eyes. It was her. In the hot dishwater his nails had become soft and he trailed them across the metal bottom of the basin to find the last spoon. Oh Jesus.''

One might reasonably ask if such a short work of fiction shouldn't be called a novella rather than a novel, and one might unreasonably get enmeshed in a debate about page length. With apologies to devotees of the form, I cannot with any enthusiasm call ``Cal'' a novella. Novellas seem to me works of fiction too long for a magazine and too thin to charge $22 for. They carry with them the unfortunate connotation of being something less, and are sometimes seen as would-be novels, or as I once heard it put, ``preemies.'' Perhaps it is only a matter of semantics or of self-designation or of personal taste, but I feel when reading a novella as though it lacked the novel's scope and breadth.

(And on the subject of short novels from Northern Ireland, I would be remiss in not mentioning the recent ``Reading in the Dark'' by Seamus Deane, 245 small pages from Knopf bearing a tale of violence and poverty in Derry paradoxically awash in the magical light of Deane's prose.)

I return to novels such as ``Cal'' and ``Lies of Silence'' often, as one goes to the well, to replenish depleted stores. Indeed, I sometimes think my own writing is an attempt to achieve the gem-like compression of the short novel. Not surprisingly then, I date the beginning of my fiction career from my 1987 reading of ``That Night'' by Alice McDermott (now a HarperPerennial paperback). So beguiled was I by the pulsating rhythms of its language and by the taut arc of the tale -- sounding a single, quivering note, as if from a tuning fork -- that I decided to spend my life trying to produce something similar. This brief novel tells the story of two Long Island teenagers in the 1960s who fall intensely and inappropriately in love -- a romance that causes a catastrophic confrontation between Rick's wrong-side-of-the-tracks friends and the fathers of Sheryl's middle-class neighborhood: ``That night when he came to claim her, he stood on the short lawn before her house, his knees bent, his fists driven into his thighs, and bellowed her name with such passion that even the friends who surrounded him, who had come to support him, to drag her from the house, to murder her family if they had to, let the chains they carried go limp in their hands.''

If my writing of fiction dates from ``That Night,'' my love of fiction dates from that Ur-novel of brevity lurking on dusty shelves of schoolrooms everywhere: ``Ethan Frome'' by Edith Wharton. The shortest of the short (181 very small pages of large type in my 1939 edition; 160 in the Scribner paperback), ``Ethan Frome'' combines elements of a yarn it might have taken another writer 400 pages to tell: suspense, a social history of a New England town, a plethora of delicious bit parts, an unforgettable triangle of three sharply drawn characters, and a wow finish. Oh, and a terrific love story about an emotionally deprived farmer, locked in a dreadful, dead-end marriage, who falls for his wife's younger cousin who has come to visit. I recall vividly my first reading of ``Ethan Frome'' on a wintry Sunday afternoon when I was 16, and the way the bleak, wet snow outside my windows seemed to echo perfectly the deeply interior mood of the novel. The book was assigned one week during my junior year in high school, and as it was a Sunday afternoon before I tackled the project, I was of course thrilled that the work was so short. What I couldn't foresee then was that in the space of a few mesmerizing hours, most of my ideas about the purposes of storytelling and literature would be formed. A framed novel, ``Ethan Frome'' is a hard, sharp diamond of a book. That it is short is not beside the point. It is the point.