Another Review of The Novel: An Alternative History

Scott Bryan Wilson in Rain Taxi on The Novel: An Alternative History. This gives new meaning to in-depth:

You might expect a heavily footnoted 700-page history of the novel up to 1600 to be anything but readable, gripping, and enjoyable, but The Novel is all of those things — immensely so. After suggesting and rejecting definitions for “novel” (including his own, “the novel is essentially a delivery system for aesthetic bliss”), Moore finally concedes that he’d “rather let authors show me what a novel can be than to impose a definition on them.” He then proceeds to the earliest Egyptian novel prototypes, which bring us “sustained narrative, dialogue, characterization, formal strategies, rhetorical devices, even parody, pornography, metafiction, and magic realism,” and by 1700 BCE in Mesopotamia, we find the “first author for whom we actually have a name: Ipiq-Aya.”

Moore moves chronologically and by region, giving the novel a deserved amount of credit for the development of our society. In addition to the religious stuff (which he sees as the downfall of civilization), he takes the time to point out things like: “Can you imagine a Jane Austen heroine declining an invitation to dance because she’s having her period? Can you imagine how much saner our society would be if she had?” and “[Satyricon is] the first novel in which the size of a male character’s genitals is noted, a detail you hardly ever get in George Eliot’s novels.” Moore has seemingly read everything, and for every book he discusses, he includes all the various translations and offers his take on each, generally recommending those he considers best (and taking translators to task for laziness, and prudishness along the way). If copies of a novel no longer exist, or it has never been translated into English, that doesn’t stop him — several books are written about using secondary sources or from clues about them mentioned in other novels from the same region. He even takes a moment to bring up untranslatable Incan novels written in arrangements of beads on knotted strings, of which the final products look like mop heads.

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Review of The Novel: An Alternative History by Scott Bryan Wilson

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