There’s something deeply satisfying about a story of this length, 50-75 pages, something you could read in a long sitting or spread out over a day or two. And I think the length especially suits Peter Taylor’s style — he’s very formal, which slows the pacing down. That means it takes a while to read A Summons to Memphis, which I enjoyed but which I wouldn’t have enjoyed as much had it been 400 pages instead of 200. “The Old Forest” is nearly perfect, because it’s long enough to be deep and rich and satisfying, but it’s short enough to leave you wanting more.

The story is about a man looking back on his early adulthood during the late ’30s. He was engaged to be married in a week, but a car crash dampens his plans. He is part of Memphis’s upper class, and he was on the road with a young middle-class woman during the wreck. She runs off into the woods and disappears during a snowstorm. The wreck presents a scandal —  an upper-class man fraternizing with what the boys call a “demimondaine” — their term for single, middle-class girls they can have fun with before they marry someone in their own class. Because of the scandalous nature of the event, the police and the town newspaper’s editor and the narrator’s father and his fiancee’s father all go on a hunt for the missing woman.

The story presents class tensions well, but also the tensions of the era — the relationships between men and women, and the coming liberation of women (the story is told retrospectively from the late ’70s). The story takes place at a time when women didn’t have many choices, but through the narrative Taylor himself is conscious of how destructive society can be. But the narrator — and maybe Taylor — is also trying to come to some kind of understanding of that past, of a relatively minor event from long ago. Thus, the story is a mystery (what happens next? where did the girl go?), a kind of bildungsroman (the narrator on the cusp of proper adulthood), and a cultural commentary (on feminism, classism, and Memphis society), all told in a breathtakingly elegant manner. Highly recommended.

I’ve been on a novella kick lately, and read the title novella out of this collection after reading Chabon’s take on the summer-of-possibility narrative (see below). Roth’s narrative is about a young Jewish librarian, Neil, from a decidedly middle class family in Newark. He hooks up with a college student, Brenda, at the local country club, a few years younger than he and from a more upper crust family. The romance between the two is full of possibility, but underlying the emotional state of the narrator is, as in Chabon’s story, a kind of refusal to grow up and accept adult responsibilities. It’s debatable how serious he is about the young woman, and about the possibility of marrying her and taking some kind of managerial position in her father’s factory. Rather, he’s content, if underpaid, at his library job.

More seriously, the narrator foreshadows some of the, for lack of a better word, nastiness that comes out in Roth’s characters. Some of Neil’s interest in Brenda seems to be her upper-class status, and he makes snide comments about her family’s money and about her in general. The relationship at times seems to be conquest for Neil, though I think it’s more complex than that. Neil does seem to have genuine feelings for Brenda, and his inner conflict carries you through the novella.

I’d recommend this story if you like Roth. It has some of his classic wit and stylistic vigor, and it’s presented in a form that you can read in two sittings. I don’t particularly have anything to say about the novella as an art form, other than it’s a good length. It offers enough space for characters to develop and for a world to be presented, without the bagginess of a full-on novel. If “Goodbye, Columbus,” were a novel, for instance, there would need to be at least one more layer of narration. The story of Neil’s infatuation with Brenda wouldn’t be enough. But if it were a short story, the world around Newark wouldn’t be as richly drawn. A good form, I’d say.

A lot of people recommended this novel to me as being on of their favorites, but I didn’t really get into it. I feel I should add a caveat up front that it might be one of those books you need to come to earlier in life (or maybe later), because the story is about a young man’s first summer out of college, and all the hope and romance and boredom that lies before him. Had I read this at 20, it might be one of my favorite novels, but it just didn’t suck its teeth into me.

The narrator, Art, is the son of a gangster and is living off his father’s money for one last summer before being thrust into the real world. He strikes up a romance with a young woman who works at  a library, and later strikes up a romance with a young man at the library. Art is confused by is identity, and all of his escapades are some kind of response to his uncertainty about the future, his ambivalence toward his father, and the general refusal-to-grow-up that has plagued young men for the past generation.

The book is structured to follow a summer, and Chabon said he had in mind other stories of summer — specifically, The Great Gatsby and “Goodbye, Columbus.” While Chabon does capture the romance and sense of possibility, the book also felt somewhat contained. It might speak for 22-year-old men everywhere recently, but I’m not sure it has much to offer someone looking to distance himself from the pointlessness of young manhood.

My short story, “Carolina Mill, 1932,” is in the current issue of The Sun:

“In the spring of 1932when I was twelve years old — the last year of my childhood, as I understood it — my grandfather left the farm and came to live with us.”

The Sun is a beautiful magazine, and this might be the peak of my literary career.