The Novella Matters

I'm always amazed that the novella isn't a more popular form. It seems with society's ever-shrinking attention span that all things would be appreciated in smaller doses. But the novella's proportions seem unfair. They're like a single drink for a recovering alcoholic—simultaneously too much, and not enough.

For readers, the short story proves more convenient, and finishing a gorilla-sized novel is a badge of accomplishment. But the novella offers no peripheral appeal.

Thus, the novella stands as the 1,200 meter. An inherently less popular race. We train to sprint, or we train to run marathons. We are absolute creatures that want things either fast or forever.

That's not to say that the novella hasn't made an impact. Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis (1915) comes to mind. But there is a definite reluctance to the form. It is often accompanied by other works. That is its only historical context. It is the meat of the short story collection. It is "The Dead" of Dubliners (1914).

Cliff Hudder's Splinterville seems self-consciously aware of this fact. The novella, winner of the 2007 Texas Review Fiction Award, is presented as faux scholarship complete with footnotes and an academic foreword. But rest assured it is a work of fiction.

Splinterville is the supposed recreation of a holograph produced by a Confederate soldier toward the end of the American Civil War. The letter, written on a continuous forty-one-foot scroll, is the recount of a friendship to the father of a deceased soldier.

It's an interesting device and well handled by the author.

Hudder's characters are as crass and colorful as you would expect confederate soldiers to be.

"It came four in the afternoon by Pard's silver watch, then in comes our Enemy, clacking his guns like a boy with stick on piling, only faster than any boy with stick can clack, and yellow cloud drifted. Clinch said it was louder than two skeletons f-king on a tin roof. You know how he talked."

Clinch, the fallen friend of the letter's author, is a pint-sized, loud-talking, Texas-born Confederate with a pension for curse words and an obscured intimacy. He serves as a perfect muse for Hudder's yarn.

That being said, there is some difficulty to the delivery.

Hudder's creative presentation makes for a slightly jarring read. The letter, written by the war addled Private Henry Oldham Wallace, is peppered with inconsistencies and written in disjointed language. This is, of course, intentional. The inconsistencies are addressed in footnotes, as is the language.

The novella follows Wallace, Clinch, and the rest of their brigade through a trek from Arkansas to Georgia, during which time they inadvertently eat hallucinogenic mushrooms and take part in the largest recorded snowball fight.

That the novella functions as a letter excuses much other story line. The work can be seen as a glimpse into the daily life of confederate soldiers, though entertaining nonetheless.

Hudder's characters encapsulate that fractured conundrum of youth participating in battle. On one hand, they are killers. But at the same time, they are children. The effects of the duality are generally devastating to the psyche, and Hudder renders this well.

"This I mean to say in its real sense, we wept and moaned with tear and grimace of sorrow, and I am not sure from where it come or who it started... we sat snow-covered like ghosts, we shivered like fish, we had a big boo hoo."

But there is a further complexity to the slim volume. In its presentation as a real-life letter, the scholar Jules H. DeRossier has made it clear that the authenticity of the work is questionable.

"I am aware that few besides specialists in this field and a small albeit vocal group of interested parties are even familiar with this peculiar document, the authenticity of which has been debated for decades."

This allows Hudder the opportunity to set up a defense, in footnote...