How to Read Novels Like a Professor: A Jaunty Exploration of the World's Favorite Literary Form
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About this ebook
Of all the literary forms, the novel is arguably the most discussed … and fretted over. From Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote to the works of Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and today's masters, the novel has grown with and adapted to changing societies and technologies, mixing tradition and innovation in every age throughout history.
Thomas C. Foster—the sage and scholar who ingeniously led readers through the fascinating symbolic codes of great literature in his first book, How to Read Literature Like a Professor—now examines the grammar of the popular novel. Exploring how authors' choices about structure—point of view, narrative voice, first page, chapter construction, character emblems, and narrative (dis)continuity—create meaning and a special literary language, How to Read Novels Like a Professor shares the keys to this language with readers who want to get more insight, more understanding, and more pleasure from their reading.
Thomas C. Foster
Thomas C. Foster is the author of How to Read Literature Like a Professor, How to Write Like a Writer, How to Read Nonfiction Like a Professor, and other works. He is professor emeritus of English at the University of Michigan, Flint, where he taught classes in contemporary fiction, drama, and poetry as well as creative writing and freelance writing. He is also the author of several books on twentieth-century British and Irish literature and poetry.
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Reviews for How to Read Novels Like a Professor
147 ratings19 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5For a refresher or a good overview of how to critically read novels this is an excellent, easy to read and understand look at how professors and critics of literature analyze it. The different elements are broken down and explained, and some of the history behind modern day thought about the novel is explained. An excellent read for members of book discussion groups, students, or anyone interested in getting more out of their reading.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I wouldn't normally have picked up this book, but alas it was one of my summer reading requirements. However, I can honestly say that I thoroughly enjoyed this book.
The reader learns about the origin and history of the life of the novel. You also will learn about various things to look for in the novels you have read, are reading, and will read. Foster talks about the importance of the first page of a novel, the various different narrative perspectives a book can include, and much more.
The main reason I enjoyed this book was due to Foster's enthusiasm about the novel. You can tell and picture his passion for writing, and all the components that go into writing a piece of work. He gives you a tip, and then shows several examples of how writers have used that tip in their own writing. The works he takes examples from can be from the oldest of classics to more modern ones. So in a sense, you are technically getting two things in one. First thing you are getting are the tips to better your comprehension while you read future novels. Second, you are getting more books to add to your TBR list, because you and I both know that our TBR lists are still not long enough.
I would definitely recommend this to anyone who is searching for some help in better understanding the components that go into reading a novel. I found this novel to be quite helpful in that department. There are parts that tend to be on the drier side, but it's a book where I felt like I could personally connect with the author. - Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I read How to Read Literature Like a Professor early last year, and was pleasantly entertained and informed by his conversational introduction to symbols and motifs common in literature. In this book, he specifically looks at the novel including how the beginning teaches you to read the novel (and grabs or fails to grab the reader), chapter breaks, ambiguity, and how the history of the novel informs its form - and how authors have been playing with this ever since.I found this book every bit as entertaining as the first, if more loosely structured. I really like Foster's approach in encouraging a variety of readers and interpretations. I greatly appreciate that he doesn't expect everyone to read like him or enjoy the same things that he does; in fact, I'm almost positive that he and I are very different readers, as I still like my novels to have less ambiguity and more finality in their endings than he clearly does. When I was an English major as an undergraduate, my experience was much less an "Aha!" and much more a "Where do professors come up with this stuff?" If, like me, you tend to take literature at its more literal level and don't get the postmodern or even just the symbolism that your English teacher said was there, you may get a lot of out these titles too.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Not as good as "how to read literature like a professor" by the same author. That one is better.This book gets far too deep into theory and has to remind the reader about 1000 times that novels are made up stories. It really got old.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A really enjoyable book. The author kind of goes on sometimes (he admits it) and kind of drives his ideas into the ground, but because this book is written in a conversational way, it's not so bad. As someone who has a (bad?) habit of only reading nonfiction, this has made me excited to read more fiction, and so it's accomplished what it set out to do.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Foster creates a conversation with his reader, guiding us to understand the approaches that distinguish classics from others. He emphasizes repeatedly how there is no magic formula, but there are certain constants. Hemingway uses short sentences; Faulkner tortuously long ones. Both force the reader to develop a meaning. I also appreciated the context he provided for various trends in fiction. Victorian novels were shaped by the serialized nature of publishing, such that chapters needed to hae a climax and the names had to be memorable enough to be familiar again with the next monthly installment. The advent of modern philosophy allowed for more uncertainty about characters and less tidy endings.Foster summarizes his points with a series of 20+ universals, such as the "Law of Universal Specificity: You can't write about everywhere or everyone, but only about one person or one place." Reading this book helped me appreciate a lot of novels I didn't fully understand. It also validated a lot of my own criticisms about specific novels and certain techniques. Foster encourages the reader to own the book, pointing out that the author's role stops with the final edits.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The cover blurb says it all: "A jaunty exploration of the world's favorite literary form."I think I would love Prof. Foster's classes. He has a way of phrasing his ideas and assertions that is humorous, friendly, and accessible. In this book, he covers the development of the novel, the Victorian influences - which were apparently monumental - and post modern writing. I personally prefer linear writing (I found out), but Foster does a such good job of explaining experimental writing that I may overcome my middle-aged stubbornness and check it out!
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I HATE the title of this book. But the book itself was worthwhile. Very accessible, it's both a reminder of forgotten lessons from high school and college literature classes and, for me, a provider of some new considerations in reading a novel. It made me want to go back and re-read some novels I've very much enjoyed but (it's clear to me now) missed so much. [The Known World], [Beloved], [Arthur and George], [To the Lighthouse] -- to name just a few. For many this book would be too basic and I admit to some embarrassment that it didn't seem too basic for my current needs. But I suspect that Foster, himself, would tell me to skip the self-abnegation and get on with having conversations with novelists.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5I love books. You know that about me. But what probably you don’t know is that there are some books that I don’t like, some books I actually hate. Yes, it’s true. I hate textbooks. I loathe textbooks. I hate the pompous, condescending tone of textbooks. I hate the know-it-all attitude of textbooks. I hate the way textbooks act like they don’t have to try to be well-written; textbooks know people will be read them anyway because people are forced to read them. I hate textbooks.So I will say, sadly, that I found this book to be a textbook. There is, sadly, nothing jaunty about this book. I liked How to Read Literature Like a Professor, this author’s previous book. But maybe Foster used up all his jauntiness in that book. In any case, I was bored to death reading this book and that’s a shame.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Professor Foster has taught college literature for many years and is well versed in the content of the world's best novels and the techniques employed by their authors. This work contains a well-organized presentation of the components of excellent novels, and outstanding examples of how specific writers implement them in particular situations. He also supplies an overview of how the novel has changed as it matured from romanticism to post-modernism.Perhaps to appeal to collegiate audiences, his presentation seems at times to be contemporary to a point of adolescence.Recommended
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5For anyone that ever wondered why literature majors could push out a twenty-odd page paper on the significance of anything in a novel and not even bat an eye when asked, "why does this matter?" this book can explain all of that in a way that's actually enjoyable. Not only does Foster present the concepts of narrative, voice and characterization in plain language, he actually makes it immensely accessible. He'll even sneak in lessons on the history of the novel, history in the novel and metafiction. Examples in the book run all the way from Beowulf to Harry Potter and everything in between - when you get a chapter that offers up examples like The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, Vanity Fair, Lord of the Rings, Lolita and The Odyssey, you know that he's thought his point through. One warning - your to-be-read pile will grow while reading this book!
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I read "How to Read Literature Like a Professor" and loved it so much, I went out and bought this book, "How to Read Novels Like a Professor" before I'd even finished the first one."Novels" provides a brief history of the novel, and then talks about how novels are structured with lots of examples and a conversational tone that makes the book interesting and fun to read. This book was more of a lecture style, compared to "Literature" which really was a "how to" guide. Both are great reads that can add to your appreciation of books.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I wish I could return to college and take a literature course with Thomas C. Foster as my professor. Since that is not possible, I am exceptionally grateful that he has now written two books that I can learn from and enjoy. How to Read Novels Like a Professor, a companion to his previous text, How to Read Literature Like a Professor, teaches the lay person how to be a more well-informed and observant reader. As with any really good teacher, Foster possesses a thorough knowledge of and real enthusiasm for his content area. He conveys his material with short, snappy chapters and utilizes a range of great literary examples. He doesn’t dictate, but rather suggests possibilities, and is able to have the reader see and now better understand what has (surprise!) been there all along. Foster’s tone is relaxed, conversational, and just (thank goodness) a bit irreverent. For example, my favorite chapter in this latest book is “Never Trust a Narrator with a Speaking Part” in which Foster explains that a first person narrator is invariably unreliable ~ he is deluded, naïve, mistaken, uninformed, in denial, etc. ~ in short, the narrator of the story doesn’t know things you know as the reader and that the author has written it that way for deliberate effect and purpose. Immediately I begin to think of all my favorite stories that were written in the first person, and of course Professor Foster is correct! How did I miss this all these years as a reader? (Or, as with any truth, did I always know, but without conscience understanding?) So with my hearty recommendation, grab a cup of cup of coffee, take a front row seat, and read along with wonderful Professor Foster.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I had loved How to Read Literature like a Professor and I very much enjoyed this one. Beyond plot and character development, Foster talks about how a novel engages, how they have evolved and how reads can form special relationships with them. It is a fun lesson in literature with Foster's signature sense of humour to lighten what could be a dull read.A great way to remind ourselves, as readers, why we love novels!
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Very interesting look at novels. Highly recommended to both literature students and non-students.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This book provided an interesting look at what a novel is, and what things to pay attention to while reading them. However, much of the 300+ pages were devoted to either the author's preferred styles and books or to specific examples out of classic works. While these portions weren't necessarily uninteresting or inapplicable, I do feel that it detracted from the seeming purpose of the book in the first place. I honestly tired of hearing him ramble about his favorite authors and books, and was frustrated that many of his unending examples were from books I haven't yet read...or may not read since we seem to have very different taste in reading. The book should have been titled "How to Read Novels that This Professor Likes".
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I love books about books and reading and this one was all the better for the humorous tone it had.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This is a good explanation of what to look for when reading a novel and, unlike many books of its kind, does not presume that only the classics are worthy to be read and analyzed. I probably would have enjoyed this book more if the author and I had any common ground in what we liked in novels. He briefly mentioned a few of the authors I spend most of my time with, spending more time on Joyce and Nabokov than I enjoy. Still, for a crash-course in literary interpretation, this is a good book.
1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A really enjoyable book. The author kind of goes on sometimes (he admits it) and kind of drives his ideas into the ground, but because this book is written in a conversational way, it's not so bad. As someone who has a (bad?) habit of only reading nonfiction, this has made me excited to read more fiction, and so it's accomplished what it set out to do.
Book preview
How to Read Novels Like a Professor - Thomas C. Foster
How to Read Novels Like a Professor
Thomas C. Foster
For Linda Wagner-Martin,
without whom the profession would be immensely poorer
Contents
Preface: Novel Possibilities, or All Animals Aren’t Pigs?
Introduction: Once Upon a Time: A Short, Chaotic, and Entirely Idiosyncratic History of the Novel
1 Pickup Lines and Open(ing) Seductions, or Why Novels Have First Pages
2 You Can’t Breathe Where the Air Is Clear
3 Who’s in Charge Here?
4 Never Trust a Narrator with a Speaking Part
5 A Still, Small Voice (or a Great, Galumphing One)
6 Men (and Women) Made out of Words, or My Pip Ain’t Like Your Pip
7 When Very Bad People Happen to Good Novels
8 Wrinkles in Time, or Chapters Just Might Matter
9 Everywhere Is Just One Place
10 Clarissa’s Flowers
11 Met-him-pike-hoses
12 Life Sentences
13 Drowning in the Stream of Consciousness
14 The Light on Daisy’s Dock
15 Fiction About Fiction
16 Source Codes and Recycle Bins
Interlude: Read with Your Ears
17 Improbabilities: Foundlings and Magi, Colonels and Boy Wizards
18 What’s the Big Idea—or Even the Small One?
19 Who Broke My Novel?
20 Untidy Endings
21 History in the Novel/The Novel in History
22 Conspiracy Theory
Conclusion: The Never-Ending Journey
Reading List: Criticism of the Novel
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Books by Thomas C. Foster
Copyright
About the Publisher
Preface
Novel Possibilities, or All Animals Aren’t Pigs?
WHEN HUCK AND JIM are floating south on their raft, where are we? How is it that we can identify with a being as monstrous, literally, as John Gardner’s Grendel? Have you ever been Lucy Honeychurch? Leopold Bloom? Humbert Humbert? Tom Jones? Bridget Jones? The novels we read allow us to encounter possible persons, versions of ourselves that we would never see, never permit ourselves to become, in places we can never go and might not care to, while assuring that we get to return home again. At the same time, the novel holds out its own possibilities, narrative miracles, and tricks that are rewards in themselves, seductions for unsuspecting and even canny readers.
Much of the continuing appeal of the novel lies in its collaborative nature; readers invest themselves in the characters’ stories, becoming actively involved in the creation of meaning. At the same time, they are rewarded by pleasures that are more intimate than the essentially vicarious genres of drama and film. That give-and-take between creator and audience starts in the first line, runs through the last word, and causes the novel to stay in our minds long after we close the cover.
And it is a real give-and-take. The novel begs to be read from its opening words, tells us how it would like to be read, suggests things we might look for. We readers decide whether we’ll go with the program, even whether we’ll read the book or not. We decide whether we agree with the author about what’s important, we bring our understanding and imagination to bear on characters and events, we involve ourselves not merely in the story but in all aspects of the novel, we collude in the creation of meaning. And we carry the book with us and keep it alive, sometimes centuries after the author himself is dead. Active and engaged reading is critical to the life of the novel and rewarding and fulfilling in the life of the reader.
In 1967, the novel was in a bad way, or so it seemed. Two seminal essays by writers with distressingly similar names appeared in American publications, fortelling doom and gloom. The French critic and philosopher Roland Barthes published an essay called The Death of the Author
in the journal Aspen. In that essay, Barthes places the whole responsibility for the construction of meaning and significance, that is to say the interpretive enterprise, on the reader, the writer (whom he prefers to call a scriptor
) being little more than a conduit through which the accumulated culture pours its texts. Barthes is being more than a little impish in denying the author the quasi-divine authority he was accorded in earlier understandings of literary creation. But what he is chiefly supporting is the role of active and creative reading, something about which we will have occasion to discuss throughout the book. Perhaps more alarmingly, the American novelist John Barth published The Literature of Exhaustion
in The Atlantic Monthly, in which he seemed to many readers to suggest that the novel was on its deathbed. What he in fact argued was that the novel as we had known it was pretty largely played out, the exhaustion
of the essay’s title referring to exhausted possibilities. Fiction, he suggested, was going to have to find something new to do in order to reinvigorate itself. There was a lot of talk of the death
of old ways in 1967, a lot of emphasis on newness, its signature event being the accumulation of outrageous humanity around the intersection of Haight and Ashbury streets in San Francisco.
What Barth seemed not to know (although with him, a lot of seeming is disingenuous) was that help was on the way. That same year, a novel was being published by a writer in Colombia and another was being composed by a writer in England, and they would offer ways forward from the apparent impasse. The English novelist John Fowles was composing The French Lieutenant’s Woman, possibly the first major commercial novel to seriously address changes in the landscape of fictional theory. At the beginning of Chapter 13, he says of his faux-historical novel that it cannot be a conventional Victorian novel despite its outward appearance as such because I live in the age of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Roland Barthes.
Instead, the novel teases readers with Victorian characters and settings even as it reminds them that it is a fictional, twentieth-century work that is merely employing Victorian conventions for its own ends. The literary gamesmanship did not harm sales; The French Lieutenant’s Woman was the best-selling novel in America in 1969. The Colombian novel was, of course, Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, which would appear in English three years later. The solution it offered was not one of metafictional play but of the wild eruption of the fabulous amidst the commonplace, what would become known as magic realism.
These works and writers changed everything, so much so that Barth returned to The Atlantic in 1979 with an essay called The Literature of Replenishment,
in which he admitted things had changed more in a dozen years than he could have foreseen and that maybe, just maybe, this novel thing did have a future. He cites García Márquez and Italo Calvino in particular as reinvigorating the form. So what does it mean to say that they changed everything
? Did everyone begin copying what they did? No, even they didn’t copy what they did. There is only one One Hundred Years of Solitude, and even García Márquez can’t write a second one. But those novels showed possibilities in the form that had not been tried in quite the same way before, things a writer might do with fiction that would be sufficiently new and interesting to keep readers hanging around.
I believe, moreover, that the essays and the novels in question show something else: the history of the genre. The novel is always dying, always running out of steam, and always being renewed, reinvented. We might say, following the philosopher Heraclitus, one cannot step in the same novel twice. To stay put is to stagnate. Even those novelists we value for their sameness—Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Ernest Hemingway—are constantly changing and growing. They move, if only slightly, from one novel to the next; they set themselves new challenges. Those who stand pat soon seem stale, flat, and unprofitable. As it is with individual writers, so it is with the form itself. The movement is neither inevitably forward nor backward; progress
in matters literary is chiefly an illusion. But movement there is and movement there must be. In a genre called novel,
readers have some right to expect novelty. That’s only fair, isn’t it?
A FRIEND OF MINE, a colleague in another discipline, noted the very slight change between the previous book’s title and this one and asked, So how are novels different from literature?
It’s an excellent question, one that the literature priesthood would never think to ask but that lay people will come up with right off. I was reminded of the old syllogism, All pigs are animals, but not all animals are pigs.
We can say roughly the same thing in literary terms by substituting novels
for pigs
and literature
for animals.
Are all novels literature? We could get some disagreement here from inside and outside the academy. A sizable percentage of literary people want to maintain walls around their little corner of heaven, although rarely do they concur on whom to wall in or wall out. Would Jonathan Franzen, for instance, object to being lumped in with Jackie Collins? Nor am I suggesting that the quality of all writing is the same. There are significant differences in quality between novels, as between poems, stories, plays, movies, songs, and dirty limericks. I would, however, suggest that they all belong to the same field of human endeavor, and we can call that field literature.
Drawing distinctions comes later. For me, there is writing (in which I would include oral forms of entertainment and instruction, since when they reach me, they’re generally written down), and writing comes in two forms, good and bad. Okay, sometimes execrable, which could be a third category but which I think we can fold into bad
writing more generally. All right then, so all novels are literature. All literature, on the other hand, is not novels. We have lyric poetry, epic poetry, verse drama, verse romance, short story, drama, and whatever those things are that Woody Allen and David Sedaris are wont to publish in The New Yorker. Among others. That only leaves one question.
Are novels pigs?
There are many elements common to all forms of literature, many sorts of signification we can see whether the writing in question is a poem, play, or novel—pattern making, imagery, figurative language, use of detail, invention, it’s a long list. There are also, however, elements that are specific to each genre. Our discussion in this book is concerned with the specific formal elements of one genre, the novel. I know, I know, those structural components, things like chapters—point of view, style, voice, beginnings and endings, and characterization—seem dull as ditchwater. They’re the groaners in English class, right? Oh, no, not flat and round characters again. But they don’t have to be that. Because they’re also the portals to meaning, the doors and windows where possibilities establish themselves. In choosing this opening and not another, the writer has closed off some options but opened up several others. A method of revealing characters both limits and determines what sorts of characters can be revealed. The way the story is told, in other words, is as important as the story being told.
And how readers will respond. I can’t go as far as Barthes in killing off the author, but I’m with him on the importance of the reader. We are the ones, after all, who exist long after the author (the real, physical being) is in the grave, choosing to read the book, deciding if it still has meaning, deciding what it means for us, feeling sympathy or contempt or amusement for its people and their problems. Take just the opening paragraph. If, having read that, we decide the book isn’t worth our time, then the book ceases to exist in any meaningful fashion. Someone else may cause it to live again another day in another reading, but for now, it’s as dead as Jacob Marley. Who’s as dead as a doornail. Did you have any idea you held so much power? But with great power comes great responsibility. If we readers are going to hold the life and death of novels in our hands, we should probably find out more about them.
Introduction
Once Upon a Time: A Short, Chaotic, and Entirely Idiosyncratic History of the Novel
IRIS MURDOCH ONLY WROTE one novel in her lifetime. But she wrote it twenty-six times. Anthony Burgess never wrote the same book twice. And he wrote about a thousand. Are those characterizations accurate? Fair? Of course not. You will hear from time to time that criticism of Murdoch, and in fairness, they are pretty similar. The Green Knight (1993), her last novel before the Alzheimer’s-damaged Jackson’s Dilemma, isn’t all that far from Under the Net (1954). Same class, same sorts of problems, same ethical preoccupations. Strong characterization and strong plotting. All this was deemed a positive virtue during her lifetime: her fans could count on a new-yet-familiar novel every two to three years. Those novels would always be solid and, once in a while, as with the Booker Prize–winning The Sea, the Sea (1978), they would knock your socks off.
And Burgess? He has his consistencies, as well. But nothing in the early novels can prepare the reader for A Clockwork Orange (1962), which is wildly unlike the Enderby novels of the 1970s, which are formally quite distant from the experimentalism of Napoleon Symphony (1974) or the historical artfulness and Elizabethan language of his novels on Shakespeare, Nothing Like the Sun (1964), and Christopher Marlowe, A Dead Man in Deptford (1993), or the Maugham-like performance of what many call his masterpiece, Earthly Powers (1980), to say nothing of his novels in verse. Where readers of Murdoch can begin a new novel with a quiet confidence, opening a Burgess book is an exercise in anxiety: what the devil is he up to this time?
Does it matter, this difference in uniformity? Not really. After all, each novel would have both its return audience and its newcomers, so each book had to teach its readers how to deal with it, as if for the first time, which for some it was.
It always is. Every novel is brand-new. It’s never been written before in the history of the world. At the same time, it’s merely the latest in a long line of narratives—not just novels, but narratives generally—since humans began telling stories to themselves and each other. This is the basic dialectic of literary history. The impulse to originality clashes with the received tradition of things already written. Miraculously, neither ever seems to overwhelm the other, and novels keep appearing, as do audiences to read them. Even so, some novels are more traditional, some more experimental, some impossible to classify.
Let’s go back to a time when the novel really was new. Once upon a time, there weren’t any novels. There were other things that were narrative and lengthy—epics, religious or historical narratives of the tribe, prose or verse romances, nonfictional narratives like travelogues. You know, The Iliad and The Odyssey, The Epic of Gilgamesh, the Táin Bó Cuailgne in Ireland, the romances of Chrétien de Troye and Marie de France. Plenty of candidates out there. Just not novels. Then some things began emerging, sporadically. It may be that the Catalan writer Joanot Martorell’s Tirant lo Blanc, first published in Valencia in 1490, is the first European novel we can recognize as such. Note the date. Columbus hadn’t sailed the sea to discover modernity yet, but he was about to. The rise of the novel coincides with the rise of the modern world—exploration, discovery, invention, development, oppression, industrialization, exploitation, conquest, and violence—and that’s no coincidence. It took more than movable type to make the novel possible; it took a new age. But I digress.
Rightly or wrongly, there are two novels we generally think of as the first
—and they’re seventy years apart. In 1678 someone, perhaps Madame de La Fayette, published a little novel of profound significance. Its popularity was such that people lined up at the publishers waiting, sometimes for months, for their copies. Take that, Harry Potter. The book is called La Princesse de Clèves, and its chief claim to fame is not as a first novel but as the first roman d’analyse, a novel of analysis, a book that investigates emotions and mental states, pushing well beyond the mere conveying of plot. Some readers three hundred and some years later may find the tale a little clunky for their tastes, although the clunkiness largely resides in the surface details, in how persons in the novel speak and address one another and how the writer handles character presentation. The mores of the novel are not ours, but they are genuine in themselves, as are the consequences that grow out of the dictates of conscience. For its time (published within a decade of the Sturm und Drang that is Paradise Lost), the narrative is an extremely subtle performance, and writers as various as Jane Austen, Henry James, Gustave Flaubert, and Anita Brookner couldn’t do what they do without it. Madame de La Fayette is one of the giants of the novel, but she’s just a kid.
At the yonder end of the century, 1605 to be exact, a book came out that really set the world on its ear. Here’s what I heard the amazing Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes say at a conference once: "All of Latin American literature grows out of Don Quixote. Not fiction or novels. Literature. All of it. The Hispanic world gets to claim Miguel de Cervantes and his masterpiece, of course, but it has to share with the rest of us. The book is simply too big for any one group to own. It’s goofy and serious, hilarious and sad, satiric and original. And it’s first. Okay, okay, there are lots of
first" novels. But this is a big first. Cervantes shows everyone else what might be done. He parodies earlier narrative forms as his Quixote descends into confusion between the world of the too-many romances he has read and the dull world life has saddled him with. Cervantes uses an out-of-touch figure locked in some never-never past to make commentary on the author’s here-and-now. His hero is comic, certainly, but there’s a forlorn quality there, too, as we watch someone too far gone in fantasy to notice, whose gestures, as in his championing of Dulcinea and his tilting at windmills, are both noble and pathetic, uplifting and pointless. When a character gives his name to an entire class of enterprise, he’s really captured our imagination. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are seared into the Western imagination; they form an archetypal pairing, so much so that, three and a half centuries later, William Hanna and Joseph Barbera could build a cartoon empire on the formula. Yogi and Boo Boo, Quick-Draw McGraw and Baba Louis, Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble are all variations on the clueless nobleman and his long-suffering, devoted servant. Now that’s a legacy. Cervantes takes the old and makes something completely new. More—he says to other writers, you can do this too, ignore convention, invent, make it up as you go. And make it up he does. No one had ever seen anything quite like it before. And no one has since. Everyone tries to measure up to Cervantes, of course, but the attempt is, well, quixotic.
At that time, of course, and for a number of years afterward, every novel was experimental. If a genre hasn’t been around long enough to establish conventions, then there can be no such thing as a conventional
specimen. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, writers of this new form understood that it was new, that it was…novel.
A word or two on literary terms: despair of definitions. What we call a novel would nearly everywhere in non-Anglophone Europe be a roman. That term derives from romanz, the universal term for lengthy narratives in verse prior to the age of print. The word novel,
by contrast, comes from the Italian term novella, meaning new and small. English removed the diminutive, stuck with the new
part, and a term was born. Fictional narratives of book length would come to be known as novels. The term romance
has been kept for a certain sort of fictional narrative, one that was more stylized, more action-driven, more reliant on character types than psychologically realistic characters, often with improbable actions. Gothic tales, adventure stories, the books of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Bram Stoker, westerns and thrillers, and, yes, bodice rippers would all come under the heading of the romance. The distinction remained in greater or lesser use for a couple of centuries, yet it was always an imprecise science. The Scarlet Letter is pretty clearly a romance, The Portrait of a Lady a novel. But what about Moby Dick? The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn? Bleak House? You see the problem. Terms are often butter knives employed where surgical precision is demanded. These days, hardly anyone differentiates between the two. When was the last time you heard someone speak of a Stephen King romance? The problem is compounded when romance
is instantly connected with Harlequin.
So we’ll stick with novel
here as our choice for book-length fictions, knowing that it doesn’t mean anything very exact. But it does mean something, and we can mostly agree on its broad definition.
But back to the early days. These new novelists did not make up their new form out of thin air. There were established forms, most of them nonfictional, for prose narrative: prose romances, letters, sermons, confessions, travel narratives, captivity narratives, histories, memoirs. And the big one, of course, the biography or life.
Samuel Richardson’s novels are epistolary; that is, they are composed as a series of letters. His most famous novel is Clarissa (1748), which at something over a million words is a whole bunch of letters. Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) follows the form of a travel narrative of a castaway—the actual model was Alexander Selkirk—while Moll Flanders (1722) uses the form of the confession and the story, very loosely, of Mary Carleton. One of the conventions of the confession is that the sinner basks in the glory of her redemption, but Moll’s narrative is much more energetic, and convincing, about her sins than about her salvation.
The bottom line, for me, is that in the early days of the novel, it was all exciting. Readers couldn’t say, Oh, we’ve seen that before; that’s so old hat.
Every novel was experimental, every foray opened new ground. That may not have been the case, of course, but it’s certainly how it looks from the twenty-first century. Now, the thing about experimentalism is that not all experiments turn out equally well. One thing that would inevitably occur is that novelists would discover, over the course of a century or so, that some narrative structures worked better than others, that it was hard to construct compelling, organized, and direct narratives out of letters, for instance. Richardson’s epistolary adventures did not set off a tidal wave of like works. Lucky for us.
So what works best? Linear narrative, plots centering around individuals either growing up or coming apart, characters in whom readers can invest large emotional capital, and clear resolutions that give emotional pleasure. In other words, the formula of the Victorian novel.
All you need is time.
How much time? How about as much as two years? These novels (and they include most of the British novels of the era) were published monthly, either in magazines or in freestanding installments (you simply walked into your neighborhood bookstand and purchased this month’s installment, boxed, of the new William Makepeace Thackeray novel), or weekly, in such newspapers as Dickens’s Household Hints or The Graphic. This latter paper was a combination of our USA Today, The New Yorker, and People. When Thomas Hardy published his penultimate novel, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, in the early 1890s, installments appeared each week except two: the week of the Henley-on-Thames rowing regatta and the week of the marriage of Prince Aribert of Anhalt to Princess Marie Louise of Schleswig-Holstein (you can’t make this stuff up). Those two editions were wholly taken up with which famous people were there to be seen and detailed descriptions of ladies’ gowns, bridesmaids’ dresses, and the doings of the beautiful people. Some things never change.
Here’s how it worked: each installment would contain a pre-specified number of words, usually two chapters of, say, four thousand words each. This would go on month after month (or week after week), sometimes for as much as two years, until the final episode was reached. That last episode would contain twice the usual number of chapters, in part because the final chapters were often a matter of wrapping up many, many loose ends and were therefore not inevitably riveting and in part to give readers a reward for patient loyalty.
So what did the serial novel look like? Chiefly, like soap operas (with less explicit sex). And for the same reasons that soap operas look the way they do, only slower. Here are the problems of telling a story over time:
Maintaining continuity
Making information manageable
Keeping audience loyalty
Continuity is a huge issue in any sort of serial narrative. You have to have consistency, so that characters act the same way last week and this. You have to periodically renew readers’ acquaintance with characters they haven’t seen for a while or with the events to date. Often, installments start with a recap of previous happenings—kind of like elementary school, where the first month or two of every fall is spent on last year’s math.
Information management? Dickens often had scores if not hundreds of characters—with names—in his triple-decker novels. And months might pass between one appearance and the next for minor characters. How to keep them memorable: that’s the problem. Well, you would (if you were Dickens) give them odd names, weird quirks, grotesque appearances, goofy catchphrases. Magwitch, Jaggers, Wemmick, Miss Havisham, Joe Gargery and Mrs. Joe. And that’s just Great Expectations. Wemmick worries constantly about his old father, whom he calls the Aged P.
Miss Havisham wears her fifty-year-old wedding dress and sits among the ruins of the never-consumed wedding feast. Think you’re likely to forget them? In David Copperfield, Mrs. Micawber says, virtually every time she appears, I shall never leave Mr. Micawber.
No one ever, ever asked her to. So why does she say it? For our benefit. We haven’t seen her since March, it’s June, and we might forget her among the Barkuses and Peggottys. As if.
Audience loyalty? Give ’em a reason to come back tomorrow, next week, next month. To accomplish this, the narrative must be plot-heavy; that is, story must be the driving force, rather than theme or form or originality or anything else. And the most important element of plot is the uptick in intensity at the end of the episode. In other words, you leave something big about to happen at the end of the episode: the cliff-hanger. The most famous example we have is the season-ending question: who shot J.R. on Dallas? Well, the Victorians had their who-shot-J.R. questions, too. The most famous involves Charles Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop, where one episode left its young heroine, Little Nell, desperately ill.
We have a desire to divorce art from commerce, to decry the influence of money on movies or corporate underwriters on museums, but the fact of the matter is that most art is influenced to some degree by business issues. If it isn’t, like lyric poetry, it’s because there’s no money to be made. Maybe that’s another point in favor of the lyric.
In any case, the real money for novelists during Victorian days was in serial publication. First, many writers made a lot of money from the contract with the journals, and second, the exposure and interest led to greater sales when the novel appeared in book form. Now, length and number of installments were a matter of serious business. Writers could expect to make anywhere from £50 (that’s pounds sterling for us Yanks) for a novel by a comparative unknown to £10,000 for a work by a major author.
And negotiations could be a tricky affair. George Eliot (real name, Mary Anne Evans), the most famous author of her day, whose husband (George Henry Lewes) acted as her agent, was offered £10,000 for her novel Romola, to be released in