Volume 54, Number 8 · May 10, 2007
Storms Over the Novel
By Hermione Lee
BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ESSAY
The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts
by Milan Kundera, translated from the French by Linda Asher
HarperCollins, 168 pp., $22.95
Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel
by Jane Smiley
Knopf, 591 pp., $26.95
The Things That Matter: What Seven Classic Novels Have to Say About the Stages of Life
by Edward Mendelson
Pantheon, 260 pp., $23.00
How Novels Work
by John Mullan
Oxford University Press, 346 pp., $24.95
How to Read a Novel: A User's Guide
by John Sutherland
St. Martin's, 263 pp., $21.95
The Novel, Volume 1: History, Geography and Culture
edited by Franco Moretti
Princeton University Press, 916 pp., $99.50
The Novel, Volume 2: Forms and Themes
edited by Franco Moretti
Princeton University Press, 950 pp., $99.50
Nation & Novel: The English Novel from Its Origins to the Present Day
by Patrick Parrinder
Oxford University Press, 502 pp., $45.00
What good is the novel, the long story told in prose? Hegel called the contingent, the everyday, the mutable, 'the prose of the world,' as opposed to 'the spiritual, the transcendent, the poetic.' 'Prosaic' can mean plain, ordinary, commonplace, even dull. Prose fiction, historians of the novel tell us, has had to struggle against the sense of being a second-rate genre. Heidegger said that 'novelists squander ignobly the reader's precious time.' In late-eighteenth-century Britain, when large numbers of badly written popular novels were being published, 'only when entertainment was combined with useful instruction might the novel escape charges of insignificance or depravity.'
Review, 4501 words
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