In Paradox Americana, San Francisco Bay Guardian online, Paul Reidinger writes about the novel, and literary forms, getting at the everlasting issue of Shouldn’t the content determine the form vs. but then who would read it if it didn’t take (that is, be forced into) the form of a novel. And about why the everlasting issue might not continue to be everlasting.
The fixation of writers on writing novels, the notion that the novel is the summa of literary forms and, if written and published, uniquely validates its author as an author, is one of the great curiosities of our curious time. You don’t have to read many novels to start suspecting that the form does not suit even many good writers, who aren’t many. Novels are architectural in a way that other literary forms — poems, short stories, novellas, essays — tend not to be, and literary minds aren’t necessarily architectural ones.
While there are narrative forms of comparable scale and complexity to the literary novel, such as memoirs and genre fiction, they tend to be constructed around preexisting templates, like tract houses. Tract houses are fine, but a literary novel, like a mansion (a real one, not a Mc-), is sui generis. The writer, acting as God, begins with a wild piece of land and proceeds to clear it (with bare hands), dig a foundation (with a lone spade), raise the building (with a single hammer), and then finish and furnish it down to the last detail according to a plan that starts to shift and slide even before the writer has finished drawing it up. That is the architectural challenge of novel writing, and it is formidable.
…Novels are still salable, the bigger the better, and that alone is reason for writers to go on writing them.
But the novel is a jealous mistress, a tyrant, and if it hasn’t entirely driven other valuable literary forms into exile, it has pretty much pushed them to the twilit margins of public attention. Literary careers even today often begin with published collections of short stories (many of them doubtless written for MFA classes), but the pressure on the young writer to come up with a novel — to be a grown-up writer rather than merely a promising one who dog-paddles in the lesser forms, no matter how artfully — is immediate and intense.
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It might be that as the publishing industry’s imperial model breaks down, eroded by the entropic and in some ways democratic forces of technology — blogs, self-publishing, books on demand, and so forth — our monomania about novels will ease. We may awake to find not only that there are plenty of other literary forms, each worthy in its own right, but that many writers prefer to work in one or another of them, and that many readers prefer it that way. Just as there is a vague distress in reading a novel written by some writer who really doesn’t like writing novels and isn’t good at it, so there is a joy in reading the work of a writer who’s found the proper form …