What do you look for in a novel?

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Sounds like your type B

"In his meditation on the works of James Joyce, Anthony Burgess delineated the two different types of novel, categorised into types A and B. The A novel, to summarise his argument, is completely in thrall to convention, tapping into traditional literary archetypes with a distinct focus on plot and character. The B novel, however, can incorporate plot and character (though it occasionally dispenses with such trivialities altogether) but its ultimate aim is to explore literary form, narrative and language."
 

craner

Beast of Burden
I don't think I look for anything in a novel, apart from opening up the world and everything in it.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
It won't surprise anyone to learn I'm a type A kinda guy. But of course it's a simplification (probably of Burgess's theory, too.) - all good novels use language inventively, even if they don't draw attention to it.

But I like fiction that presents and analyse human psychology and behaviour. That sounds terribly dry, but encompasses Tolstoy, Austen, Flaubert (two of which I can only read in translation of course). It makes me feel a little stupid, really, but I like novels that teach me about life.

Aesthetic bliss + wisdom is the ideal I suppose. Large parts of what I've read of Ulysses supply both in abundance.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Presumably this is the aim of increasingly modern techniques isn't it? I mean when I was little I seem to remember asking someone why did Van Gogh paint like that and they replied that although in one sense it's not "how things truly look" in another sense it might be a better representation of how people truly perceive things in a busy moving world in which we're not properly focusing on most of it - and as a teenager that was quite profound for me. And I think a lot of art does have a trajectory along that arc towards our fractured and complex understanding of things (that's obviously a generalisation, there are plenty of movements in the opposite direction or perpendicular to this direction whatever that might mean) - Burroughs yeah and there are countless other examples. I think it was developed almost simultaneously by different people in literature.
In television, we were watching this thing High Maintenance the other day and there was this bit where Sex and the City is on on a tv in the background and it felt to me like some sort of deliberate contrast. Both are/were set in NY City featuring youngish, hip-ish people doing stuff - but the way HM is done makes Sex and the City looks so dated, stagey, fake - because HM is done in this very low-key way in which things are sort of implied and left to the viewer, scenes are unfinished, plotlines not resolved, or not on screen. A similar feeling arose in me when I saw an episode of Friends after having been watching Curb Your Enthusiasm which at the time was a lot more improvised - on the older show you could basically see someone stepping up to their mark and declaiming their lines to the audience as they must have done in Shakespeare's Stratford while everyone else stood back as an observing chorus, there was no sense that the people on screen were relating to each other. Of course that's an exaggeration but I suppose in terms of acting that's quite a simple development in acting:
Classic acting - everyone stops while the lead orates at the audience --> Friends - nominally the actors are talking to each other but it's clear from the way they face and stop perfectly to let others talk that it's strictly choreographed --> Curb - there is a much bigger mess, ums and ers, speaking at the same time and feels more realistic (until the next thing comes along)
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Fair points being brought up, and interesting observations IdleRich — I'd like to think about that "natural" shift towards naturalism more...

Re: modernist/postmodernist fiction more closely "resembling life" — I won't quibble with that entirely but I have to say that I find the people in DeLillo, say, wholly unconvincing as compared to people in Tolstoy. That's obviously "the point" as far as DeLillo is concerned, but you might say that his fiction is only concerned with resembling life in certain particulars. (I know you didn't mention DeLillo but I'm not that familiar with the authors you have mentioned, although it's another obvious point to make that Burroughs — so far as I can recall — in 'Naked Lunch' isn't concerned with presenting reality 'as is' but through a satiric, Swiftian distortive lens).

I guess you were replying to me saying "I like literature that teaches me about life" - Just to say, I wasn't attacking modernist/postmodernist novels there, more reflecting on my prioritising of "wisdom" over "aesthetics". I am highly aware of this because I so love the translated stories/novels of authors like Chekhov/Tolstoy/Flaubert, where I can't appreciate what they did with language. I can appreciate other aesthetic aspects such as structure but generally I'm not in it for the language, I'm in it for how it enriches my perspective on people and "life".

I'm not sure why my reading is so retrograde and conservative. Perhaps I was corrupted by Harold Bloom? Doesn't seem unlikely. (Though he was a big fan of Pynchon, for example.)

Maybe I should go out of my way this year to read more fragmented post-modern books? I read 'Cosmopolis' a few years ago and enjoyed it quite a bit. I'm not anti DeLillo, not anti McCarthy, not anti Roth...

One of the virtues of the novel, in fact, is that it's so expansive that it can be all manner of things. How closely does Moby Dick resemble Pride and Prejudice? And how closely does Ulysses resemble Middlemarch?
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Re: modernist/postmodernist fiction more closely "resembling life" — I won't quibble with that entirely but I have to say that I find the people in DeLillo, say, wholly unconvincing as compared to people in Tolstoy.0
Off the top of my head I would reply to that with, in (say) Tolstoy's era lots of people tried to write novels and some were better than others. By common consensus Tolstoy was pretty good at it. Later on you have lots of authors writing in this whatever-you-want-to-call-it-style and probably, let's face it, DeLillo simply isn't as good a writer as Tolstoy. Possibly if you had Tolstoy with his ability to write realistic characters transplanted to a more modern style which allows greater realism his characters would be even more amazing. Or not, I dunno. It seemed to make sense when I started writing it.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
The thing is it's all so complicated and there are so many strands within literature and art that even if one idea is right about one strand it may be totally wrong when applied to something else. There is no unified theory.
And anyway, I'm not even sure if High Maintenance is better... well probably it is better than SATC but it's not amazing or anything. It's just quite realistic at times.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Some do write in archetypes - you mentioned above DeLillo having everyone as a philosopher but McCarthy is surely the worst (or most extreme, it has to be deliberate) for that, every tramp or soldier or whatever they meet spouts some wise soliloquy about the world, the universe, love and faith etc
 

version

Well-known member
Just to say, I wasn't attacking modernist/postmodernist novels there, more reflecting on my prioritising of "wisdom" over "aesthetics". I am highly aware of this because I so love the translated stories/novels of authors like Chekhov/Tolstoy/Flaubert, where I can't appreciate what they did with language. I can appreciate other aesthetic aspects such as structure but generally I'm not in it for the language, I'm in it for how it enriches my perspective on people and "life".

I think the brilliance of someone like Joyce is that they can do both.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
To get back to the original question. What I look for in a novel is not really anything specific like some do above... maybe for me it's in the name, novelty. Something I've not read before. I do love classic novels, trash novels, post-modern and experimental things. Sci-fi too I suppose, probably less into crime or war type things but if it's the only thing there I will read it. Same as music, I really feel that in the time we're in now we can dig into the whole of what's available from the history of literature and don't have to limit ourselves to this era. Of course literature doesn't have scenes in the same way imposing stuff on us (it does but not so extreme I suppose) so it's more common with books. We don't have to think things have got worse or improved, we can enjoy each on its merits. Of course we have favourites. And actually that I can make a link between how in music my favourites are things that are kinda weird but yet immediate, in the same way my favourite books tend to be those that are experimental but still hit you emotionally in the same way as a good old-fashioned sentimental classic.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Well that is a different question I suppose... I think that when I open a novel I'm hoping that I don't know what will happen and how and so I'm not expecting to find something that I'm looking for.
 
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