Can a history of the novel ever be written? The quantity of reading is inconceivable. I suppose people who say they love novels usually read between 10 and 100 novels a year. Though in extreme cases this may rise higher, the assiduous reader's coverage only translates into 1,000 novels a decade, including rereadings. When you think of the number of novels with some claim on our attention, it seems almost impossible that any one writer could cover the ground.
Or rather: it is made possible by the predetermined limits of sticking to what we have already decided constitutes greatness. It seems ungrateful in the extreme to complain about Michael Schmidt's approach, when he has read so voraciously and has written a series of sparkling and insightful disquisitions on so many different authors. But the fact remains that histories of the novel are stuck at the level of studies of the great. It is as if political history remained at the level of kings and queens.
Histories of the novel have to do two completely different things. The novel is interesting only when dealing with specifics, and any account of art that talks only about general tendency will fail. "Where are my favourite passages?" Schoenberg said on seeing an analysis of the Eroica by Schenker. "Ah – there they are … in the tiny notes." Schmidt does the tiny notes beautifully, and an alert, specific comment often brings the flavour of a page of Faulkner or Charlotte Brontë before us. The book took me a good while to read, as I kept breaking off to rediscover this novel or that. To that extent it is a great success.
But a history of the novel also has to cover the underlying tendencies, the innovations and the fashions, and this alone can't be done by exploring the local triumphs of the uniquely great. Schmidt, I think, is quite an unreliable guide to the general movements of fashion, bafflingly categorising Beckford's Vathek as a gothic novel rather than an example of that common 18th-century form, the oriental tale. We don't hear a great deal about when trends first arise and when they sweep into fashion, nor about the economic pressures that shape a novel, nor the general, rather than personal, circumstances in which novelists work.
It may be argued that nobody reads novelists for these reasons, but a history of the novel, especially one described as a "biography", ought to discover the inner life of the form and its routine, as well as its extraordinary, manifestations. General tendencies are hard to discover: I think the only moment when I've had a real sense of what was of interest to the English-language novel was the year I read 130 novels to judge a prize, and was struck (this was 2001) by how many alternated present-day archival study and historic narrative, influenced by AS Byatt's Possession and Alan Hollinghurst's The Swimming-Pool Library.
What are the moments when first-person narratives become prevalent? (They come and go.) When do innovations such as present-tense narratives, second-person and first-person plural narratives first arise, and when do they become popular? What happens to the epistolary novel? (I think it turns into the novel of multiple documents, such as The Woman in White.)
Phenomena such as novels assembled out of multiple distinct narratives, especially after Naipaul's great In a Free State in 1971, deserve explanation. When did exotic narrators start being seen in fiction, such as the narrator who is also an inanimate object? (The earliest one I know of is in Charles Johnstone's massive 1760s bestseller Chrysal, or the Adventures of a Guinea, not mentioned by Schmidt.) Above all, what are the shifting grounds on which novelists negotiate the territory between interior life and exterior observation, including the innovations of free indirect style, consistent point of view, interior monologue and stream of consciousness – all of which are supposedly invented by late-19th century men and all of which can be found in some form in Jane Austen between 50 and 80 years earlier? Some of this is covered in passing by Schmidt, such as free indirect style in a chapter on Flaubert, but it deserves its own historical account.
Schmidt's book is an immense survey of the careers of the best-known novelists in English. It begins some time before the novel takes recognisable shape, with thoughts about the appeal of the not-true and the fantastic in medieval travel writing. Prose romances and Elizabethan narratives of martyrdom are brought in: not novels, but works where there is an urge towards fiction and the marvellous. We move seamlessly towards the first formal novels, with Sir Philip Sidney, John Bunyan, Aphra Behn, and then … Zora Neale Hurston.
The interruption of the chronological pageant with the great 20th-century African-American writer is startling, but such a move is in fact orthodox in narratives such as this. Ever since EM Forster's 1920s lectures about the novel, it has been commonplace to suggest that great novelists exist not in a line, but in a sort of circle removed from the developments of time. Melville is the same sort of novelist as Joyce, who is the same sort of novelist as Sterne; Clarissa does exactly what David Nicholls's One Day does, with delay, resistance, romance and tragedy.
Schmidt goes along with this, diversifying a generally chronological approach with the insertion of novelists from much later. (He doesn't do it in reverse, inserting remote ancestors into 20th-century chapters.) His essays on individual novelists are acute, draw interesting parallels, have little shame about talking about biographical details in a very old-fashioned way – "There are touches of [John Dickens's] wife in Mrs Micawber". The problem is that we have very little sense of how the novel develops from within. Forster's point about novelists sitting in a circle was a commendable attempt to avoid any Whiggish sense that they are somehow improving on their predecessors. What it, and Schmidt, fail to account for is a real sense of how writers are always polishing and refining on the technical insights of their predecessors. George Eliot and even Flaubert have a loose approach to point-of-view: we can see them hopping from mind to mind within a scene. A generation later, Henry James is absolutely strict: we never find out what more than one character is thinking without a firm formal break. We may actually prefer the looser approach of the earlier generation, but there is no doubt that a subsequent generation has embarked on a project of refinement and development. This is the proper subject of a history of the novel.
It would be lazy and very easy to point out the obvious omissions in a history such as this, and to guess at reasons for each one. I'm only going to say that I'm amazed that Robert Smith Surtees has been left out, but not surprised: whereas for previous historians, he was the single example of the novelist of hunting, and explored for reason of subject matter, for Schmidt and his American publisher, he may deserve to be neglected for precisely the same reason. His status as divine virtuoso of the helter-skelter prestissimo makes Mr Facey Romford's Hounds one of the great novels of the 19th century.
Beyond individual omissions, I do think that Schmidt should pay more attention to what people actually read: a history of the postwar novel in English that mentions The Lord of the Rings principally as the object of Edmund Wilson's disdain is avoiding the point. Schmidt's selection of the contemporary novelists worth writing about is, of course, completely wrong, but we will leave future decades to discover just how wrong. And the conscious omission of the short story leads to some curious claims. VS Pritchett was a great radical in his short stories, but a surprisingly ordinary novelist: the exclusion of what makes him great leads Schmidt to claim that Pritchett's "story lines are generally conventional", which may be true of Mr Beluncle, but certainly not of "When My Girl Comes Home". The index, too, is a total waste of time, consisting of nothing but the names of writers and their books.
It's an engaging and interesting book, written by an acute reader who rightly trusts his own taste and has read more than most of us will ever get through. What I would really like is for Schmidt to take a deep breath, set aside the lives of the great, their individually extraordinary natures, and finally write a 200-page book about how the flavours and techniques of the novel changed from time to time: how in 1750 the fashionable novel was a series of intimate, richly adjectival letters about not going to bed with a man, and in 2014 it was a present-tense first‑person screed about sitting in a characterless airport without a single metaphor within reach. There must be some kind of answer.
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