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Different Kinds of Novels and One of Mine 11/17/2014 4:28:32 PM
There are different ways of classifying novels. I found a useful one in Edwin Muir's The Structure of the Novel. He describes four main categories, chronicles (War and Peace), novels of action and character (Vanity Fair), period novels (The Forsyte Saga), and dramatic novels (the works of Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy) . He said that the chronicle novel was the prevailing form at the time he wrote (1928).
In our day, at least by my reading, dramatic novels must be the most common. The work of most of the novelists (Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes, Pat Barker, John McGahern) I've read recently fits into this category -- one series of actions rising to a peak and then resolving. Surely most of what we now call genre fiction (romance, sci fi, thrillers, detective stories) emphasize plot and dramatic structure.
I've identified another common novel-type -- stories that focus on one character for two hundred pages or more. Some of our classics novels belong here: Portrait of the Artist, Catcher in the Rye, and countless other first person stories. Their appeal is easy to figure out: They offer readers a mind other than their own to inhabit for a few hours and a chance to see common situations from a new angle. In some cases, one character stands out from the community of which he or she is a member, Hamlet, say, or Emma Bovary, Huck Finn. In other cases, a character represents the traits of a whole community, Tom Sawyer, Isabel Archer.
I won't push the notion very far because I'm not a philosopher but it may be that some of the stories that explore one consciousness are the result of our adherence to Descartes' dictum -- the fact that we think proves that we exist.
What about another kind of novel -- that tells the story of a community or an endeavor from multiple points of view. In a way, this procedure would reflect our own lives, since most of us know various groups of people in different places and different times. We may lose track of them, we may wonder about their behavior and what they think of us, but we do not doubt their existence.
All of this palaver is shameless advocacy for some of my own attempts at novel-writing. I call one The World, the City, and the Wakemans, 99 brief chapters and three interludes about a middle class family in a large city. Here's the first paragraph:
It was a warm, late-spring evening. Most of the people coming up the stairs from the subway stop at Humboldt Square were headed for the baseball game at Crosby Field. But one member of the rough, amiable crowd, a middle-aged man with two shopping bags filled nearly to the top that were covered all over with drawings of palm trees and coconuts, mingled with the others for a few moments, then walked as fast as he could down a shadowy side street lined with lindens and elms past a row of bent, bursting, metal-hatted trash cans, and then around a rain puddle slowly drying in the evening sun. The shopping bags, whose strong twine handles he held tightly, swished against his legs.
Amos is on his way to help a crotchety old friend in need.
For me, this is a humorous story at times, partly satiric, about how the Wakemans cope with the perils and changes of present-day urban life. It also pokes gentle fun at the need each of them has to think that what they are doing is by definition good.
