That a collection of three novellas was published at all, let alone by a new author who then received high praise and numerous glowing reviews, is an event worth writing about. Josh Weil’s The New Valley is an impressive anomaly. But how does one write about novellas? Yeah, yeah: like a novel only shorter. I know you were thinking it. But that form is nebulous in my mind. Weil writes about it in a recent issue of Poets & Writers: “A novella compresses the world with a short story’s focus, but it explores that smaller space with a novel’s generosity.” Weil sticks to his definition.

What Weil has done with his three novellas is complete a total piece in which the place is the main character. Every novella takes place in the hill country between West Virginia and Virginia. The characters all live with the same river and valleys, the same terrain and weather. The continuity of place in these three novellas does more to connect them than if the characters overlapped. Weil has created an entire world for the reader in which she can imagine others living out their own dramas.

The place, though, somehow maintains its strength in the background; Weil’s characters carry the weight of the stories and propel the reader through the book, both racing to the finish and wishing it would never end. This author is capable of bringing the reader so into a character’s mind as to live his life with him for just a few pages.

Weil improbably connects the reader to a character through a cow in Ridge Weather, the first of the novellas. After the death of his father, the main character finds himself alone and more than lonely. He almost wishes his herd of cattle ill so he can mend them. One finally does fall sick and he tries with painful stubbornness to heal it. He needs to be needed.

The author masterfully manipulates time in the second novella, Stillman Wing. The reader loses track of time and even years passing along with the main character as he ages far into his 70s. His birthdays are occasional markers, which he seems to remember as an afterthought, and the object that keeps him grounded in the present is the tractor he works on day and night to restore. Outside this comfort zone he loses track of past and present, and sometimes the reader too lives in both.

The last novella, Sarverville Remains, remarkably brings the reader into the mind of a high-functioning mentally retarded man. He is writing a letter to a man in prison attempting to explain events surrounding his incarceration, but midway through becomes muddled, aware something in his account is wrong. The reader is similarly confused and figures things out the same way he does; reacts to the events the same way he does.

Individually or together the novellas represent an impressive debut. Separately the stories stand alone and are powerful in their own right. Together their power resonates in the feeling of a place Weil has created and the sense of solitude and desperation that all his characters must struggle with.

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