Gretel and the Great War and Stringing Stories into a Novel

Few fiction writers have found fame through short stories alone. Jorge Luis Borges was one: each of his fictions is a universe (sometimes several), but he never wrote a longer work. Neither did Alice Munro or Raymond Carver. But even Anton Chekhov, whose name is practically synonymous with the short story, wrote a novel. I recall reading that George Saunders contrived the script-like form of Lincoln in the Bardo, with its frequent spaces and wide margins, in part to stretch his comfort zone to novel length. Critical acclaim and a Booker were the result. Had Lydia Davis been born a century or two earlier, one imagines that she would have been an aphorist. Born fifty years later, she might never have published anything but tweets. But perhaps because of the literary market’s preference for novels, she ventured one early in her career, before making her name as a writer of very short fictions.

Ours is a culture that values the novel above literature’s many other forms. I’m no exception. I know Katherine Anne Porter’s one novel by name, but none of her many stories. I keep meaning to read more Isaac Babel and Diane Williams, but never turn to them. In such a landscape, what is a writer to do who is naturally a miniaturist, a sprinter rather than a marathoner? The filmmaker Robert Altman’s adaptation of nine Carver stories into Short Cuts offers one path, with the intersection between plots creating a single world (a strategy that is most successful in cinema when contingency and coincidence are themselves the theme). In fiction, the analogous form is the story cycle, composite novel, fix-up, or novel-in-stories (each term suggesting slightly different tendencies). But other approaches are available as well. Enter Adam Ehrlich Sachs, whose three books offer instructive examples of how to produce length by combining shorter narratives, and create unity less dependent on happenstance and the random crossing of characters’ paths.

Inherited Disorders (Reagan Arts, 2016) consists of 117 “stories, parables, and problems” (as the subtitle has it) in a mere 262 pages—not a marathoner’s math. Like Davis, one of his favorite writers, Sachs can compress a character’s neuroses or a perfect reversal of plot into just a few paragraphs. He wanted to call his first book a novel, and it does have far greater unity than most collections, but his editor demurred. (I reviewed it for AGNI in 2019, and it remains one of the funniest books I have ever read.)

I take it that novels are so much more marketable than story collections because one can more easily answer the question “What’s it about?,” whether in cover copy, a review, or when making a recommendation. Saunders and Davis are the rare writers who’ve transcended that question, as their names themselves are the draw. A high-wire concept like that of Sachs’s debut—more than a hundred stories, all relentlessly pursuing the theme of what fathers leave their sons—allows a more memorable answer than: I don’t know, the psychological struggles of various unrelated middle-class characters amid the ongoing indignities of late-stage American capitalism?

His second book, The Organs of Sense (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), is about the seventeenth-century philosopher Leibniz’s investigations of a blind astronomer. I can offer that encapsulation because Organs is Sachs’s most novelistic book, yet it spills beyond such a potted summary. Influenced by Thomas Bernhard, some of its length and unity come from the strength of its voice, hopping associatively from gripe to gripe. It also engages a strategy of expansion at least as old as Scheherazade and One Thousand and One Nights, that of the frame tale: a story giving way to sub-stories, giving way to yet more. The trick to earning the label “novel,” which Sachs pulls off adroitly, is to bring enough of the strands together.

Gretel and the Great War, Sachs’s latest (FSG Originals, 2024), splits the difference between his first two books. Like The Organs of Sense, it is labelled a novel, but as with Inherited Disorders, it’s the sheer accumulation of stories, anecdotes, and tales that most appeals. Instead of being unified from within by a monomaniacal theme, the parts of Gretel and the Great War are unified primarily from outside, by its formal concept. There are twenty-six of them, beginning with “The architect of advanced age at last builds an abode” and ending with “The Zionist zigzags.” In between are a hotelier, an immunologist, an obstetrician, a veteran, and other characters from a decayed empire—not our own, but rather late Austria-Hungary. Like Sachs’s previous novel, this one doesn’t seek historical verisimilitude or try to show off years of archival research; instead, it mines another era and culture for absurdities. An explorer’s constant recruiting for an expedition that will never begin feels like a grift common in our time, but is it driven by the delusions of the recruiter or recruited? And the immunologist? Recent years have raised that character, previously obscure, to prominence.

Gretel and the Great War is set in early twentieth-century Vienna, but its alliterative, alphabetic games are more reminiscent of the somewhat later, and primarily Parisian, Oulipo—a group that pioneered ways of aggregating short narratives into unexpected wholes. Georges Perec puzzled together the stories of an apartment block’s residents into Life: A User’s Manual, and avoided the letter “e” entirely in A Void. Italo Calvino glued together the various story beginnings of If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler with alternating sections on the meta-adventures of its second-person hero, “you the reader.”

The twenty-six letters and tales of Gretel and the Great War do come together, though not into as tight a weave as The Organs of Sense, which features a literal tapestry in its moment of reveal. Here, the sanatorium of one Dr. Krakauer plays a prominent role, allowing for the interweaving of the plots, plural, of its patients through the looser logics of madness.

So many novels being published now try too hard to be timely and have been rendered stylistically homogenous by the spread of MFA workshop culture. Selected by comp-conscious editors, they are rarely groundbreaking, more often mimicking a familiar success or trying to mash up several. Amid such trends, one of my greatest pleasures as a reader is discovering a weird old writer with a back catalog worth working through. Another is discovering a new writer who’s bravely doing their own thing, and then awaiting each new book from them. Since I first read Sachs in n+1 almost a decade ago, nothing of his has disappointed.

In spite of the formal differences among his books, a through line has emerged in his choice of avant-garde artists as characters. The first story of Inherited Disorders concerns a nature poet whose descriptions of creeks and ferns are read as meditations on the sins of his Nazi father, until he (both the poet and Sachs) effects a wild reversal. The penultimate story begins when “a talented young lawyer who was also a promising Expressionist poet fell though the ice and drowned.” His father and friends, with different ideas about which legacy to memorialize, go back and forth, erecting competing forms, each adding to and recontextualizing the rest, until the “ten senseless and unsightly statues were part of the legacy of German modernism.” Gretel and the Great War’s aforementioned architect, a version of Adolf Loos (for whom ornamentation was a crime), leads tours of Vienna “in which he will point out only those buildings that have been built in a sufficiently simple manner. . . . By the end of the day it is observed that the architect has not pointed out a single building.” Next in the alphabet, the novel’s ballet master steeps himself in the history of dance, then invents—or discovers—a sixth position to add to classical ballet’s five, “probably the most natural possible position of the feet,” yet one which his wife, “the most technically skilled ballerina in Europe,” cannot assume without falling over.

Where each of Sachs’s books suggests a strategy for short story writers in a market that craves novels, his fables sneak artistic experimentation into an overwhelmingly commercial culture. Such portraits of avant-garde artists are at once ridiculous and reverent—and, because of the latter, inspiring. In some of my fiction, I have tried to put into practice a lesson learned from Sachs, about how to make philosophical influences palatable to a wider readership through humor. In some of my academic work, I have meditated on the connections between Sachs, Davis, and Ben Marcus, on the one hand, and the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein on the other. Both in Wittgenstein’s thought and in that trio’s fiction, often overtly influenced by Wittgenstein, the interplay of the familiar and strange reaches all the way to the level of syntax and diction, rendering even grammar uncanny.

Sachs abandoned graduate work in the history of science after reading Nietzsche’s second untimely meditation, “On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life,” which argues that what’s valuable about the past is what invigorates us now. By taking an oblique approach, drawing on history, philosophy, and art, rather than portraying, say, our addiction to daily feeds on a burning planet, Sachs’s fiction achieves its own kind of timeliness, reaching for deeper significance through the absurd.