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A friend recently picked up This Is Happiness by Niall Williams.
That’s a book I often praise. I love its deep Irishness and humor.
She laughed at the opening chapter, which I had forgotten:
It had stopped raining.
That was it.
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There are many, many more words that come later, but there are just those four in that first chapter. I guess in Ireland, and certainly for this book, that one sentence was momentous enough to merit its own chapter.
I remember in college reading William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. It contained an extremely short chapter that kind of blew my mind:
My mother is a fish.
That was all, just five words — a playful idea that appealed to me enormously. I’m not sure why, because you could easily dismiss the short chapter as gimmicky. But to me, then and now, I thought of it as clever and refreshing.
That idea stuck into my head for years and years. Maybe someday I’ll write my own very, very short chapter. And I did fulfill that Grand Ambition in my well-reviewed, absolutely ignored novel, Better Off Undead. Which is too bad, because I think it’s one of the most entertaining books I’ve written. Anyway!
The previous chapter, “Fight,” described a confrontation between Adrian (who is a zombie) and a group of tough middle-schoolers. It ends this way:
And then, right there in front of Leonardo di Pizza, fueled by the strength of the undead, I feasted on their flesh.
The next chapter is titled, “Not Really.” The entire contents of that chapter:
Kidding.
That’s it, one word.
The following chapter is titled “Actually,” which goes on to describe what really happened. Hopefully a reader finds it all playful and amusing, in the same way Faulker’s short chapter pleased me, or Williams’ opening salvo elicited a laugh from my friend.
But what about you, Dear Reader? Can you think of other examples of extremely short chapters in literature?
I’ll give you one more favorite. This is from Stephen King’s It:
Nothing much happened for the next two weeks.
Ha!
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