OH, THE PLEASURES OF FINE LITTLE BOOKS, AND THE WOE OF THE TOMES

Author: By Katherine A. Powers

Date: SUNDAY, April 26, 1998

Page: L4

Section: Books

On my alphabetically arranged shelves, the first novel of fewer than 200 pages is Martin Amis's ``Night Train.'' Exactly! I don't even know why I keep this dreadful thing -- except that it takes up so little space. Down the line, though, some lean Paul Austers signal trouble -- but surely he's an exception, certainly his wonderfully strange little novels are sui generis. Next, Kay Boyle's ``Plagued by the Nightingale'' at 190 pages lifted my spirits high enough for them to crash badly a few books down on the slim spines of James Buchan. ``The Golden Plough,'' a very great book, is, thank goodness, a bloated 201 pages, but ``High Latitudes,'' also great, is a problem with 192. Another exception? Hmmmm. Lots of little Isabel Colegates show their slight, under-200 figures down a shelf. That's good. They're followed by Maria Edgeworth's ``Castle Rackrent'' (an emaciated 85 pages) and George Eliot's ``Silas Marner'' (191 pages -- albeit of very small print).

Then, nothing. That, save the books I shall mention below, is it for good short novels by women on my shelves. Meanwhile, dandy ones by men greet my eye at every pass: Raymond Kennedy's ``Flower of the Republic'' (128 pages); ``True Grit'' (190 pages) and ``Norwood'' (176 pages) by Charles Portis; ``Billy Liar'' by Keith Waterhouse (187 pages), to mention only the very best. So, the theory has gone belly up, but were you to read the four books that gave it brief life, I think you would understand its inception.

There is no question in my mind that the master of the short novel today is Penelope Fitzgerald. To be sure, she has just won the National Book Critics Circle award for ``The Blue Flower'' (Mariner Books, $12) -- a hefty novel in this context at 226 pages. Still, her earlier novels are being republished in paperback, the two most recent being ``Off Shore,'' a wee slip of a thing at 141 pages, and ``The Gate of Angels'' at 167 (Mariner, $11 and $12, respectively). The first is set in London on Battersea Reach on the Thames in a community of barge and boat dwellers; and the second at Cambridge University in its tiniest college. Both are small, eccentric communities, but Fitzgerald's genius is such that, through them and in a minimum of pages, she demonstrates more about the way of the world, about how people are, and the human predicament than most writers do in a lifetime of scribbling. Her economy and control is unmatched by anyone I can think of right now. She somehow manages to be both whimsical and rigorous. Even incorporating the great ghost-story writer M. R. James into ``The Gate of Angels'' turns out to be not only a funny thing but also integral to the plot. Moreover, every passage works at multiple levels. Plot, theme, point of view, character, time and place, milieu and spirit of the age are simultaneously conveyed and then further illuminated by her subtle irony.

For instance, in ``Off Shore'' she describes ``a row of decrepit two-up, two-down brick houses, the refuge of crippled and deformed humanity,'' and continues: ``Whether they were poor because they were lame, or lame because they were poor, was perhaps a matter for sociologists, and a few years later, when their dwellings were swept away and replaced by council flats with rents much higher than they could afford, it must be assumed that they disappeared from the face of the earth.'' So much is suggested here, so deftly, about the present order of things, about the nature of irrelevance, about a way of thinking in which obliviousness is an essential operating function. And that is just one scene-setting sentence.

Compression and universality are the key elements of the great short novels. Sue Townsend's disturbing and compassionate ``Ghost Children'' (Soho, $22) possesses both. The author is best known for her comic novels, among them most notably ``The Queen and I'' and the Adrian Mole series. Here she has entered much darker territory, though she has not abandoned her penetrating sense of comic irony. This is the story of Christopher Moore, a man who has never been reconciled to his erstwhile girlfriend's having aborted their child 17 years ago. She is Angela, now married to the seemingly priggish Gregory. Also at large in these 192 pages are Tamara, the dim-witted punk mother of a neglected toddler, Storme. Tamara is the daughter of a grieving and alcoholic widower, Ken, and wife of sorts to Crackle, a Satanist, a loser and, as it happens, a crack head.

In the course of keeping an active and surprising plot in motion, Townsend gives the life stories of all these characters with ingenious dispatch. By the end I knew them all -- a good deal better, in some cases, than was pleasant. I emerged from this little book amused and horrified, saddened and perplexed, and with a heightened, if dismal, appreciation of England, indeed, of Western civilization, in its decline.

The frugality, at 116 pages, of ``Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury'' by Sigrid Nunez (HarperFlamingo, $18) owes something to its main human characters' being Virginia and Leonard Woolf. In other words, countless other books have already put us in the picture about who these people were and what they were up to. This particular addition to what amounts to an industry addresses the Woolfs from the point of view of Mitz, Leonard's pet marmoset. The story of this creature's 4 1/2 years with the pair, from 1934 into 1939, is written in exceptionally simple prose, in the ingenuous style of a marmoset, perhaps. It is charming, even to one who is no fan of Virginia. Indeed, the life described seems as rarefied and alien to me as it does to the marmoset.

I have been increasingly dismayed by what seems to be the proliferation of huge, windy novels. Not big, 19th-century-style dramas filled with character and plot but great tomes of pointless verbiage, the byproducts of undisciplined minds. What's it all for? Is it possible that the appearance (and reappearance) of these four books augers the dawning of a new age of short novels? Of understatement and restraint? I suppose not.