In Sunday’s Washington Post Book World, David Ignatius reviewed the new Richard Bausch novel, Peace (not to be confused with the Gene Wolfe novel of the same name). At the end of his long critique of the novel, Ignatius quoted Bausch’s contrasting definitions of the novel and short story. Apparently, Bausch has written that with a novel, it’s a matter of the writer “staying with it and working it over until it is right, and complete—all emotions earned, all strands of interest played out, everything resonating as it should, everything as lucid as it can be made without doing violence to the demands of the story,” while a short story is instead “the world in miniature.”

So far, so good. But then Ignatius inserted his own opinion about the difference between longer and shorter fictional forms, and seemed to demonstrate a complete lack of appreciation for one of my favorite story lengths. He stated that:

This book is somewhere in between the two forms—a novella would be the proper term, I guess. That’s an awkward length, too long for the diamond solitaire of a story; too short for the jewel box of a novel.

First of all, I find it odd that Ignatius seemed unfamiliar with the novella, as if this was the first time that he’d ever had to grapple with the concept (indicated to me by his “I guess”). But in addition, I find his distaste for the novella to be, well, distasteful, and not just because many consider the novella to be the best tool with which to tell a science-fiction tale, which means that a slam against the novella could be taken (if we follow the thought out to its natural conclusion) as a slam against science fiction. It also stands as an illogical literary statement in its own right, because setting genre aside, many of the fiction’s finest stories have been novella-sized, everything from Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” to Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener” to Joyce’s “The Dead.”

So why does Ignatius seemed baffled by novellas with his first sentence and disdainful of them with his second? His aside seems to me to be too broad a statement to be included in a review of the particular book under consideration, and completely unnecessary.