Are novellas about to become the new literary fad? If so, you can probably thank (or blame) the increasing popularity of books on audio-tape and short fiction's suitability to the format - the average novella can be accommodated without cuts on a double tape, as Tom Wolfe recently demonstrated when he chose to bring out his minimum opus, Ambush at Fort Bragg, on tape rather than in print form.
Of course, there have been notable novellas in the past (Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's, Banville's The Newto n Letter, to name just a few that immediately come to mind), but publishers have usually regarded them as tricky propositions - neither short stories nor novels, and thus difficult to market to a readership weaned on one or the other.
However, E. Annie Proulx's 56-page Brokeback Mountain, due from Fourth Estate in the autumn, shouldn't prove too troublesome to sell - indeed, the film rights to this raunchy story of two Wyoming ranch-hands who fall in love have already been bought by Sony, with Larry McMurtry busy writing a screenplay for director Gus Van Sant, while the audiotape is part of the release package, too.
Meanwhile, the same writer's prize-winning The Shipping News is also to be made into a movie, with John Travolta in the main role.
Quote of the Week comes from Martin Amis when asked if, at the start of his career, he ever discussed writing with his father: "Not really. He never gave me any encouragement at all. I later realised how valuable and necessary that was."
Later in the same Paris Review interview, he talks sensibly (though, in today's literary world, rather provocatively) about prose:
"I would say that the writers I like and trust have at the base of their prose something called the English sentence. An awful lot of modern writing seems to me to be a depressed use of language . . . The English sentence is like a poetic metre. It's a basic rhythm from which the writer is free to glance off in unexpected directions. But the sentence is still there. To be crude, it would be like saying that I don't trust an abstract painter unless I know that he can do hands . . .
"Much modern prose is praised for its terseness, its scrupulous avoidance of curlicue, et cetera. But I don't feel the deeper rhythm there. I don't think these writers are being terse out of choice. I think they are being terse because it's the only way they can write."
British dramatist Tom Stoppard, who has just completed a screen adaptation of Raymond Chandler's unfinished last novel, Poodle Springs, lives in Chelsea within spitting distance of Swan Walk, where Chandler lived in 1958 when he was writing the book.
Tom didn't know this when he was working on the screenplay for director Bob Rafelson. In fact, as he told the New York Times, he didn't know it until the other day when he hosted a party in the Chelsea Psychic Garden, "where the mulberry trees throw their afternoon shadow into Swan Walk itself. I must have parked my car outside Chandler's house".
So what? Well, let Tom tell it: "The coincidence seems pregnant with significance until overtaken by the yet more disturbing realisation of its complete meaninglessness." Indeed. Now where's that Private Eye Pseud's Corner address?
Nicholas McLachlan, who is one of the directors of Dingle Writing Courses in Ballintlea, Ventry, Co Kerry, is mindful of my general scepticism about the notion of teaching people how to write.
Nicholas agrees with me on that. However, he believes that "the conducive surroundings to encourage the habit of art" can be provided and he quotes Flannery O'Connor to back him up. "Art," she says, "is the habit of the artist, and habits have to be rooted deep in the whole personality. They have to be cultivated like any other habit, over a period of time, by experience; and teaching is largely a matter of helping the student develop the habit of art."
That, Nicholas maintains, is all that Dingle Writing Courses do: "We promise nothing more." And he adds that this year's tutors "providing the drug to feed the habit" include Paul Durcan (poetry), Anne Enright (fiction), Evelyn Conlon (fiction), Michael Harding (theatre and film) and Pat Boran (starting to write).
The Dingle courses run from September to November, and if you want fuller details, you can get the brochure from the address mentioned above or by telephone or fax from (00 353) 66 59052 or by emailing Nicholas at: dinglewciol.ie.
I suppose I could reiterate my doubts about the whole matter, but as I've warily agreed to conduct a similar kind of course in Dublin this autumn, such doubts might come across as a mite hollow.
Don't miss the current issue of the London Review of Books, which has a new story by the great Alice Munro, a provocative view of Trimble and Ulster Unionism by Ronan Bennett and an absorbing extended essay by Colm Toibin on the Great Irish Famine.