The best novella I know is “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption” by Stephen King. It was made into a brilliant movie, but the novella is even better.
It’s about hope. I talk a lot about hope, mostly in ambivalent ways. But perhaps I am coming to some conclusions. Perhaps there are different kinds of hope, like mushrooms, some that are truffles and some that will kill you dead.
“Shawshank” is the most comprehensive, brutal, joyful examination I’ve ever read of the different kinds of hope. The hope like a rattlesnake you keep insisting makes a really good pet until it bites you hard and then coils away looking for its next meal. The hope that is indistinguishable from fear. The hope that relies on magical thinking, if only… And there is the hope that is the first cousin of will, that sees you to the end of a long hard road.
When I was learning to swim, the instructor would step back ten feet from where I clung to the edge of the pool, and hold out his arms, and smile: swim to me, he would say, and I would throw myself out and gasp and thrash and paddle like hell, and he would step back and back and back, and I had to keep going. But he was always there at the end. That is perhaps the only hope that has ever really done me any good, the hope that makes me willing to keep swimming because there will be something at the end that is risk rewarded, that is safety and triumph and relief and a new kind of knowledge of myself and the world. Not if only, but rather if I do…
Dear Red,
If you’re reading this, then you’re out. One way or another, you’re out. And if you’ve followed along this far, you might be willing to come a little further. I think you remember the name of the town, don’t you? I could use a good man to help me get my project on wheels. Meanwhile, have a drink on me — and do think it over. I will be keeping an eye out for you. Remember that hope is a good thing, Red, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies. I will be hoping that this letter finds you, and finds you well.
I didn’t read that letter in the field [… ] I went back to my room and read it there, with the smell of old men’s dinners drifting up the stairwell to me — Beefaroni, Rice-a-Roni, Noodle Roni. You can be that whatever the old folks of America, the ones on fixed incomes, are eating tonight, it almost certainly ends in roni.
I opened the envelope and read the letter and then I put my head in my arms and cried. With the letter there were twenty new fifty-dollar bills.
And here I am in the Brewster Hotel, technically a fugitive from justice again — parole violation is my crime. No one’s going to throw up any roadblocks to catch a criminal wanted on that charge, I guess — wondering what I should do now.
I have this manuscript. I have a small piece of luggage about the size of a doctor’s bag that holds everything I own. I have nineteen fifties, four tens, a five, three ones, and assorted change. I broke one of the fifties to buy this tablet of paper and a deck of smokes.
Wondering what I should do.
But there’s really no question. It always comes down to just two choices. Get busy living or get busy dying.
–from “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption” by Stephen King
