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Novels that Should Be Short Stories
March 4, 2008

I just finished one of January's Big Books: The Senator's Wife by Sue Miller. 

There was a lot I liked about it, there was a lot I disliked about it ("It was the best of times..."). But when I came to the end, my first thought was "This would have made an intense short story." All of the backstory needed to understand the dramatic-verging-on-farcical climactic scene could have been encapsulated into a few paragraphs. 

Miller's particular gift is recognizing situations that push boundaries and buttons; in this book, it's the juxtaposition of young and old, whole and broken, even madonna versus whore, that makes the situation so intense.

                                                                   

Here's the thing: regardless of what I didn't like about the book (for a book critic, there's always something), the problem is not that Miller writes poorly. On the contrary; she's a gifted storyteller and has put together an elegantly constructed novel on the whole. 

The problem, for me, was that the situation was so intense it would have been better to experience it as a short story. Most of the things that happened to the four main characters in the past didn't seem to matter once I'd gotten to that scene. (An aside on that something: the younger husband, Nate, is so sketchily drawn that he hardly exists. In a short story, that would have been fine. In a novel, it's a flaw.)

Which novel do you think would have been better as a short story? Why?

Posted by Bethanne Patrick on March 4, 2008 | Comments (6)