The last four novels Roth composed prior to his retirement—which include Everyman, Indignation, The Humbling, and Nemesis have also been lately grouped together as “Nemeses.” The novels—more accurately deemed novellas, in sharp contrast to hefty tomes likes those collected as “The American Trilogy”—are not grouped together by a common protagonist, but rather by their notable brevity and by common theme: all four deal closely with the subject of mortality. This chapter offers an expanded discussion for the rationale of grouping these novels together (and, as with the other categorizations, the pitfalls of doing so), and will provide an overview of their critical reception and commentary on how they draw upon and depart from Roth’s earlier body of work.

Whereas much scholarship on the history of the novel focuses on its relationship to large narrative forms such as epic or romance, this chapter argues that the novella tradition plays a central role in the development of the novelistic world. We show how intercalated novellas, translated or adapted from Italian or Spanish, inflect the emergence of the French novelistic canon, functioning as sites at which cultural difference is explored and managed. Material from the novella tradition helps shape and define the notions of national character and identity, as well as the role of a national language, in the emerging French canon. The chapter moves from the history of translation and editing, through a discussion of Scarron and Mme de Lafayette, to a study of the politics of genre.

One aspect of McEwan’s celebrated status as a stylist is his distinctive contribution to the novella, a genre that arguably reached its pinnacle in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Novellas like Amsterdam (1998), with its focused critique of the left-leaning elite who did well in the Thatcher era, and On Chesil Beach (2007), with its (apparently) precise anatomy of sexual mores, reveal how McEwan uses the novella as an incisive instrument of cultural analysis. Embracing, as well, The Cement Garden (1978) and The Comfort of Strangers (1981), this chapter considers what it means to be an accomplished contemporary novella writer by making the case that, throughout his career, McEwan has continued to work with great skill in an overlooked literary form, once thought to be the most sophisticated mode of shorter fiction.