What Is a Novel? How the Long Prose Story Took Over Literature

The word comes from the Italian novella, a piece of news, a new thing, and the form's distinguishing feature was originally exactly that: it told of ordinary people in a recognisable present rather than of gods, kings and knights in a legendary past. The critic Ian Watt, in 1957, called this formal realism: the novel presents particular people with proper names, in particular places, at particular times, whose experience is reported in enough detail to be believed. Epic and romance had told of types, Achilles or Lancelot, doing what heroes do; the novel told of Robinson Crusoe counting his barrels of gunpowder. Its other marks follow from that. It is in prose, because prose is the language of report; it is long, because a life takes space; and it is about individuals in society, because that is where its readers lived.

Long prose fictions existed before the novel. The Greeks and Romans wrote romances of shipwreck and separated lovers, and Petronius's Satyricon and Apuleius's Golden Ass are comic prose narratives with a claim to the name. The Tale of Genji, written by a lady of the Japanese court around 1010, is a thousand pages of psychological fiction about a prince's loves and has the strongest claim of all to be the first novel. Medieval Europe had prose romances of Arthur, and Spain in 1554 produced Lazarillo de Tormes, the first picaresque, the life of a rogue told by himself. The book that most histories start from is Don Quixote, 1605 and 1615, in which Cervantes sent a man who had read too many romances out into the real Spain to be beaten up by it, and in doing so wrote a story about the gap between books and life that the novel has been telling ever since.

The English novel arrived in a rush. The conditions were a growing literate middle class with money and leisure, printers who could reach them, circulating libraries, a Protestant habit of examining one's own conscience in diaries, and a philosophy, from Locke, that held that truth came through the individual's experience. Some landmarks:

• •Robinson Crusoe, Defoe, 1719: a castaway's diary of survival, presented as true, the first best-seller of the form
• •Pamela, Richardson, 1740: a servant girl's letters resisting her master, the first novel to make readers weep in public
• •Tom Jones, Fielding, 1749: a comic epic in prose, its author present on every page arguing with the reader about what a novel should be
• •Tristram Shandy, Sterne, 1759 to 1767: a novel that fails to get its hero born until volume three and mocks every convention the form had just acquired
• •Pride and Prejudice, Austen, 1813: the marriage plot perfected, with a narrator who slides in and out of her heroine's mind in a technique the form would use for two hundred years

The nineteenth century was the novel's empire. Serialised in magazines and read aloud in families, Dickens, Balzac, Tolstoy, Eliot, Flaubert and Dostoevsky wrote books that a whole society read together and that tried to hold a whole society inside them, and the realist novel, long, many-charactered, socially panoramic, became what the word meant. Then the form turned inward. Henry James refined the point of view; Proust spent seven volumes on memory; Joyce, in Ulysses in 1922, put a single Dublin day through every style the language possessed; Woolf dissolved plot into consciousness; Kafka wrote realism about impossible events. Since then the novel has done everything and refused to be defined, absorbing history, fantasy, autobiography and the essay, and the recurring announcement of its death, made in every decade since the 1920s, has been followed each time by a new one that people queued for.

The novel took over because it fitted the way modern people understood themselves: as individuals with inner lives, making their way through a society that could be described, in a time that moved forward. It could contain anything, since prose has no rules of the kind that govern verse; it could be read alone and silently, which suited a culture of privacy; and it could be sold, which suited a culture of commerce. Its critics from the beginning said it was a form for women, servants and the idle, which was partly true and turned out to be a strength, since those were most of the readers there were. The form's defining quality, that it tells of particular people who did not exist as though they had, remains the oddest and most durable thing about it.

There is no official rule for how long a novel must be, but publishers, prizes and writers work with rough conventions. A short story can be read at a sitting and usually runs to a few thousand words; a novella falls in between; and a novel generally starts somewhere around forty to fifty thousand words, with most published novels well above that. The Hugo and Nebula awards for science fiction make the line explicit, counting anything over 40,000 words as a novel. At the other extreme, Tolstoy's War and Peace runs to well over half a million words in English.

The difference is more than length. Edgar Allan Poe argued in the 1840s that a short story should aim at a single effect, with every sentence serving it, something a reader takes in whole. A novel has room for what a short form cannot hold: characters who change over years, several plots running side by side, and a society wide enough to contain them. Novellas such as Conrad's Heart of Darkness or Kafka's The Metamorphosis sit between, often following one situation to its end with the intensity of a story and something of a novel's depth.

The story of the novel is often told as a European one, but China developed its own tradition of long prose fiction centuries before Defoe. Four works later grouped as the classic novels set the pattern: Romance of the Three Kingdoms, a vast historical saga; Water Margin, about a band of outlaws; Journey to the West, the comic and magical pilgrimage of a monk and his monkey companion; and, in the eighteenth century, Cao Xueqin's Dream of the Red Chamber, a detailed portrait of a great family's decline that many readers rank with Tolstoy for its crowd of individual characters.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the European form spread and was remade wherever it went. Japanese writers such as Natsume Soseki adapted it to a society changing at speed. Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, published in 1958, told the coming of colonial rule to an Igbo village from the inside and became one of the most widely read novels from Africa. Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, in 1967, mixed family chronicle with the matter-of-fact miraculous and helped make Latin American fiction a world presence. Each borrowed the form and bent it to local storytelling.

The shape of many famous novels owes a great deal to how they were sold. For much of the nineteenth century new British novels were issued in three volumes at a guinea and a half, a price few readers could pay. The real buyers were circulating libraries, above all Mudie's, which lent the volumes one at a time to subscribers. That system rewarded long books, slow-moving plots and respectable content, since Mudie's refused to stock novels it judged improper. It collapsed in the 1890s, when the big libraries demanded lower prices and publishers turned to cheaper single volumes.

Serial publication shaped books in a different way. Dickens made his name with The Pickwick Papers, issued from 1836 in monthly parts costing a shilling each, and he wrote most of his novels that way, often only a few instalments ahead of the printers. Each part needed its own small climax and an ending that made readers buy the next, which is why Victorian chapters so often close on a hook. Large casts with memorable names, catchphrases and quirks helped readers keep track of characters across months, and an author could watch sales and letters and adjust the story as it went.

The novel's habit of describing private life in close detail repeatedly brought it before the courts. In 1857 Gustave Flaubert was prosecuted in Paris for offending public morals with Madame Bovary, the story of a doctor's wife whose love affairs end in debt and suicide. The prosecutor read passages aloud to show that the book made adultery attractive; the defence argued that it showed vice punished. Flaubert was acquitted, and the trial made the book famous. In the United States, Joyce's Ulysses was effectively banned for more than a decade, until a judge ruled in 1933 that it was not obscene.

The best-known British case came in 1960, when Penguin Books published an unexpurgated edition of D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover and was prosecuted under the new Obscene Publications Act of 1959. That law allowed a defence of literary merit, and Penguin called dozens of writers, critics and clergy to supply it. The prosecutor famously asked the jury whether it was a book they would wish their wives or servants to read, a question that already sounded like another age. The jury acquitted, the book sold in enormous numbers, and the verdict is often treated as a turning point in what British publishers felt free to print.

A novel is a long fictional narrative in prose about particular, named individuals in a recognisable world, a form with ancient and medieval ancestors, an arguable first example in The Tale of Genji and a conventional founding in Don Quixote, that took its modern shape in eighteenth-century England when a literate middle class, printing and a philosophy of individual experience came together. It dominated the nineteenth century as the realist novel, turned inward in the twentieth, and remains the form in which modern societies tell themselves what they are like.