Novel, an invented prose narrative of considerable length and a

certain complexity that deals imaginatively with human experience,

usually through a connected sequence of events involving a group of
persons in a specific setting. Within its broad framework, the genre of
the novel has encompassed an extensive range of types and
styles: picaresque, epistolary, Gothic, romantic, realist, historical—to
name only some of the more important ones

The term novel is a truncation of the Italian word novella (from the
plural of Latin novellus, a late variant of novus, meaning ―new‖), so
that what is now, in most languages, a diminutive denotes historically
the parent form. The novella was a kind of enlarged anecdote like
those to be found in the 14th-century Italian
classic Boccaccio’s Decameron, each of which exemplifies the
etymology well enough. The stories are little new things, novelties,
freshly minted diversions, toys; they are not reworkings of known
fables or myths, and they are lacking in weight
and moral earnestness. It is to be noted that, despite the high
example of novelists of the most profound seriousness, such
as Tolstoy, Henry James, and Virginia Woolf, the term novel still, in
some quarters, carries overtones of lightness and frivolity. And it is
possible to descry a tendency to triviality in the form itself. The ode or
symphony seems to possess an inner mechanism that protects it
from aesthetic or moral corruption, but the novel can descend to
shameful commercial depths of sentimentality or pornography.

Elements
Plot
The novel is propelled through its hundred or thousand pages by a device
known as the story or plot. This is frequently conceived by the novelist in very
simple terms, a mere nucleus, a jotting on an old envelope: for
example, Charles Dickens’ Christmas Carol (1843) might have been conceived
as ―a misanthrope is reformed through certain magical visitations on
Christmas Eve,‖ or Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) as ―a young
couple destined to be married have first to overcome the barriers of pride and
prejudice,‖ or Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866) as ―a
young man commits a crime and is slowly pursued in the direction of his
punishment.‖ The detailed working out of the nuclear idea requires much
ingenuity, since the plot of one novel is expected to be somewhat different
from that of another, and there are very few basic human situations for the
novelist to draw upon. The dramatist may take his plot ready-made from
fiction or biography—a form of theft sanctioned by Shakespeare—but the
novelist has to produce what look like novelties.

The example of Shakespeare is a reminder that the ability to create an

interesting plot, or even any plot at all, is not a prerequisite of the imaginative
writer’s craft. At the lowest level of fiction, plot need be no more than a string
of stock devices for arousing stock responses of concern and excitement in the
reader. The reader’s interest may be captured at the outset by the promise of
conflicts or mysteries or frustrations that will eventually be resolved, and he
will gladly—so strong is his desire to be moved or entertained—
suspend criticism of even the most trite modes of resolution. In the least
sophisticated fiction, the knots to be untied are stringently physical, and
the denouement often comes in a sort of triumphant violence. Serious fiction
prefers its plots to be based on psychological situations, and its climaxes come
in new states of awareness—chiefly self-knowledge—on the parts of the major
characters.

Melodramatic plots, plots dependent on coincidence or improbability, are

sometimes found in even the most elevated fiction; E.M. Forster’s Howards
End (1910) is an example of a classic British novel with such a plot. But the
novelist is always faced with the problem of whether it is more important to
represent the formlessness of real life (in which there are no beginnings and
no ends and very few simple motives for action) or to construct an artifact as
well balanced and economical as a table or chair; since he is an artist, the
claims of art, or artifice, frequently prevail.

There are, however, ways of constructing novels in which plot may play
a desultory part or no part at all. The traditional picaresque novel—a novel
with a rogue as its central character—like Alain Lesage’s Gil Blas (1715)
or Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749), depends for movement on a succession
of chance incidents. In the works of Virginia Woolf, the consciousness of the
characters, bounded by some poetic or symbolic device, sometimes provides
all the fictional material. Marcel Proust’s great roman-fleuve, À la recherche
du temps perdu (1913–27; Remembrance of Things Past), has
a metaphysical framework derived from the time theories of the
philosopher Henri Bergson, and it moves toward a moment of truth that is
intended to be literally a revelation of the nature of reality. Strictly, any
scheme will do to hold a novel together—raw action, the hidden syllogism of
the mystery story, prolonged solipsist contemplation—so long as the
actualities or potentialities of human life are credibly expressed, with a
consequent sense of illumination, or some lesser mode of artistic satisfaction,
on the part of the reader.

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Character
The inferior novelist tends to be preoccupied with plot; to the superior
novelist the convolutions of the human personality, under the stress of artfully
selected experience, are the chief fascination. Without character it was once
accepted that there could be no fiction. In the period since World War II, the
creators of what has come to be called the French nouveau roman (i.e., new
novel) have deliberately demoted the human element, claiming the right of
objects and processes to the writer’s and reader’s prior attention. Thus, in
books termed chosiste (literally ―thing-ist‖), they make the furniture of a room
more important than its human incumbents. This may be seen as a transitory
protest against the long predominance of character in the novel, but, even on
the popular level, there have been indications that readers can be held by
things as much as by characters. Henry James could be vague in The
Ambassadors (1903) about the provenance of his chief character’s wealth; if
he wrote today he would have to give his readers a tour around the factory or
estate. The popularity of much undistinguished but popular fiction has
nothing to do with its wooden characters; it is machines, procedures,
organizations that draw the reader. The success of Ian Fleming’s British spy
stories in the 1960s had much to do with their hero, James Bond’s car, gun,
and preferred way of mixing a martini.

But the true novelists remain creators of characters—prehuman, such as those

in William Golding’s Inheritors (1955); animal, as in Henry
Williamson’s Tarka the Otter (1927) or Jack London’s Call of the
Wild (1903); caricatures, as in much of Dickens; or complex and
unpredictable entities, as in Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, or Henry James. The reader
may be prepared to tolerate the most wanton-seeming stylistic tricks and
formal difficulties because of the intense interest of the central characters in
novels as diverse as James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939)
and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1760–67).

It is the task of literary critics to create a value hierarchy of fictional character,

placing the complexity of the Shakespearean view of man—as found in the
novels of Tolstoy and Joseph Conrad—above creations that may be no more
than simple personifications of some single characteristic, like some of those
by Dickens. It frequently happens, however, that the common reader prefers
surface simplicity—easily memorable cartoon figures like Dickens’ never-
despairing Mr. Micawber and devious Uriah Heep—to that wider view of
personality, in which character seems to engulf the reader, subscribed to by
the great novelists of France and Russia. The whole nature of human identity
remains in doubt, and writers who voice that doubt—like the French
exponents of the nouveau roman Alain Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute,
as well as many others—are in effect rejecting a purely romantic view of
character. This view imposed the author’s image of himself—the only human
image he properly possessed—on the rest of the human world. For the
unsophisticated reader of fiction, any created personage with a firm position
in time–space and the most superficial parcel of behavioral (or even sartorial)
attributes will be taken for a character. Though the critics may regard it as
heretical, this tendency to accept a character is in conformity with the usages
of real life. The average person has at least a suspicion of his own complexity
and inconsistency of makeup, but he sees the rest of the world as composed of
much simpler entities. The result is that novels whose characters are created
out of the author’s own introspection are frequently rejected as not ―true to
life.‖ But both the higher and the lower orders of novel readers might agree in
condemning a lack of memorability in the personages of a work of fiction, a
failure on the part of the author to seem to add to the reader’s stock of
remembered friends and acquaintances. Characters that seem, on recollection,
to have a life outside the bounds of the books that contain them are usually
the ones that earn their creators the most regard. Depth of psychological
penetration, the ability to make a character real as oneself, seems to be no
primary criterion of fictional talent.
Scene, or setting
The makeup and behaviour of fictional characters depend on
their environment quite as much as on the personal dynamic with which their
author endows them: indeed, in Émile Zola, environment is of overriding
importance, since he believed it determined character. The entire action of a
novel is frequently determined by the locale in which it is set. Thus, Gustave
Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857) could hardly have been placed in Paris,
because the tragic life and death of the heroine have a great deal to do with the
circumscriptions of her provincial milieu. But it sometimes happens that the
main locale of a novel assumes an importance in the
reader’s imagination comparable to that of the characters and yet somehow
separable from them. Wessex is a giant brooding presence in Thomas Hardy’s
novels, whose human characters would probably not behave much differently
if they were set in some other rural locality of England. The popularity of Sir
Walter Scott’s ―Waverley‖ novels is due in part to their evocation of a romantic
Scotland. Setting may be the prime consideration of some readers, who can be
drawn to Conrad because he depicts life at sea or in the East Indies; they may
be less interested in the complexity of human relationships that he presents.

The regional novel is a recognized species. The sequence of four novels

that Hugh Walpole began with Rogue Herries (1930) was the result of his
desire to do homage to the part of Cumberland, in England, where he had
elected to live. The great Yoknapatawpha cycle of William Faulkner, a classic
of 20th-century American literature set in an imaginary county in Mississippi,
belongs to the category as much as the once-popular confections about Sussex
that were written about the same time by the English novelist Sheila Kaye-
Smith. Many novelists, however, gain a creative impetus from avoiding the
same setting in book after book and deliberately seeking new locales. The
English novelist Graham Greene apparently needed to visit a fresh scene in
order to write a fresh novel. His ability to encapsulate the essence of an exotic
setting in a single book is exemplified in The Heart of the Matter (1948); his
contemporary Evelyn Waugh stated that the West Africa of that book replaced
the true remembered West Africa of his own experience. Such power is not
uncommon: the Yorkshire moors have been romanticized because Emily
Brontë wrote of them in Wuthering Heights (1847), and literary tourists have
visited Stoke-on-Trent, in northern England, because it comprises the ―Five
Towns‖ of Arnold Bennett’s novels of the early 20th century. Others go to the
Monterey, California, of John Steinbeck’s novels in the expectation of
experiencing a frisson added to the locality by an act of creative imagination.
James Joyce, who remained inexhaustibly stimulated by Dublin, has exalted
that city in a manner that even the guidebooks recognize.

The setting of a novel is not always drawn from a real-life locale. The literary
artist sometimes prides himself on his ability to create the totality of his
fiction—the setting as well as the characters and their actions. In the Russian
expatriate Vladimir Nabokov’s Ada (1969) there is an entirely new space–time
continuum, and the English scholar J.R.R. Tolkien in his Lord of the
Rings (1954–55) created an ―alternative world‖ that appeals greatly to many
who are dissatisfied with the existing one. The world of interplanetary travel
was imaginatively created long before the first moon landing. The properties
of the future envisaged by H.G. Wells’s novels or by Aldous Huxley in Brave
New World (1932) are still recognized in an age that those authors did not live
to see. The composition of place can be a magical fictional gift.

Whatever the locale of his work, every true novelist is concerned with making
a credible environment for his characters, and this really means a close
attention to sense data—the immediacies of food and drink and colour—far
more than abstractions like ―nature‖ and ―city.‖ The London of Charles
Dickens is as much incarnated in the smell of wood in lawyers’ chambers as in
the skyline and vistas of streets.