Types of novel

To make fiction out of the observation of social behavior is sometimes regarded as less worthy than to produce novels that excavate the human mind. And yet the social gestures known as manners, however superficial they appear to be, are indices of a collective soul and merit the close attention of the novelist and reader alike. The works of Jane Austen concern themselves almost exclusively with the social surface of a fairly narrow world, and yet she has never been accused of a lack of profundity. A society in which behavior is codified, language restricted to impersonal formulas, and the expression of feeling muted is the province of the novel of manners, and such fiction has been produced as readily in the 20th and 21st centuries as in the era of Fanny Burney or Austen. Such novels as Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust (1934) depend on the exact notation of the manners of a closed society, and personal tragedies are a mere temporary disturbance of collective order. Even Waugh’s trilogy Sword of Honour is as much concerned with the minutiae of surface behavior in a very closed society (an army) as with the causes for which that army fights. H.H. Munro (“Saki”) in The Unbearable Bassington (1912), an exquisite novel of manners, says more of the nature of Edwardian society than many a more earnest work. It is conceivable that one of the novelist’s duties to posterity is to inform it of the surface quality of the society that produced the very same novelist; the great psychological profundities are eternal, manners are ephemeral and have to be caught. Finally, the novel of manners may be taken as an artistic symbol of a social order that feels itself to be secure.

Epistolary

The novels of Samuel Richardson arose out of his pedagogic vocation, which arose out of his trade of printer—the compilation of manuals of letter-writing technique for young ladies. His age regarded letter writing as an art on which could be expended the literary care appropriate to the essay or to fiction, and, for Richardson, the creation of epistolary novels entailed a mere step from the actual world into that of the imagination. His Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1748) won phenomenal success and were imitated all over Europe, and the epistolary novel—with its free outpouring of the heart—was an aspect of early Romanticism. In the 19th century, when the letter-writing art had not yet fallen into desuetude, it was possible for Wilkie Collins to tell the mystery story of The Moonstone (1868) and Bram Stoker to tell the horror story of Dracula (1897) in the form of an exchange of letters, but it would be hard to conceive of a modern detective novel using such a device, when the well-wrought letter has become nearly obsolete.

Yet contemporary examples of the epistolary novel (and the “diary” or “journal” novel) are still published, often to critical and popular acclaim, including Stephen King’s Carrie (1974), Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982), Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin (2003), Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007), and Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019).

One 20th-century substitute for the long letter was the transcribed tape recording—which became, as Samuel Beckett’s play Krapp’s Last Tape (1959) indicates, a device for expressing alienation rather than a tool of dialectic. But it shares with the Richardsonian epistle the power of seeming to grant direct communication with a fictional character, with no apparent intervention on the part of the true author. Some modern novels have been framed as oral histories, a form typically used in nonfiction. The ubiquity of the Internet and mobile phones by the early 21st century led some novelists to experiment with books composed as a series of emails, instant messages, or texts.

Pastoral

Fiction that presents rural life as an idyllic condition, with exquisitely clean shepherdesses and sheep immune to foot-rot, is of very ancient descent. Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe, written in Greek in the 2nd or 3rd century ce, was the remote progenitor of such Elizabethan pastoral romances as Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia (1590) and Thomas Lodge’s Rosalynde (1590), the source book for Shakespeare’s As You Like It. The Paul et Virginie of Bernardin de St. Pierre (1787), which was immensely popular in its day, seems to spring less from the pastoral utopian convention than from the dawning Romanticism that saw in a state of nature only goodness and innocence. Still, the image of a rural Eden is a persistent one in Western culture, whatever the philosophy behind it, and there are elements of this vision even in D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow (1915) and Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928).

The more realistic and ironic pictures of the pastoral life, with poverty and pig dung, beginning with George Crabbe’s late 18th-century narrative poems, continuing in George Eliot, and reaching sour fruition in Thomas Hardy, are usually the work of people who know the country well, while the rural idyll is properly a townsman’s dream. The increasing stresses of urban life make the country vision a theme still available to serious fiction, as even a work as sophisticated as Saul Bellow’s Herzog (1964) seems to show. In Philip Roth’s American Pastoral (1997) it is the social and political upheavals of the modern era, especially the Vietnam War and the protest movement, that disrupt the middle-class dream of rural contentment. But, since Stella Gibbons’s satire Cold Comfort Farm (1932), it has been difficult for any British novelist to take seriously pastoral lyricism.

Apprenticeship

The bildungsroman, a type of novel about upbringing and education, seems to have its beginnings in Goethe’s work, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1796), which is about the processes by which a sensitive soul discovers its identity and its role in the big world. A story of the emergence of a personality and a talent, with its implicit motifs of struggle, conflict, suffering, and success, has an inevitable appeal for the novelist; many first novels are autobiographical and attempt to generalize the author’s own adolescent experiences into a kind of universal symbol of the growing and learning processes. Charles Dickens embodies a whole bildungsroman in such works as David Copperfield (1850) and Great Expectations (1861), but his approach allows the emerged ego of the hero to be absorbed into the adult world, so that he is the character that is least remembered. H.G. Wells, influenced by Dickens but vitally concerned with education because of his commitment to socialist or utopian programs, looks at the agonies of the growing process from the viewpoint of an achieved utopia in The Dream (1924). In Joan and Peter (1918) Wells concentrates on the search for the right modes of apprenticeship to the complexities of modern life.

The school story established itself in England as a form capable of popularization in children’s magazines, chiefly because of the glamour of elite systems of education as first shown in Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s School Days (1857), which is set at the famous public school in Rugby. In France, Le Grand Meaulnes (1913) of Alain-Fournier is the great exemplar of the school novel. The studies of struggling youth presented by the German-born novelist Hermann Hesse became, after his death in 1962, part of an American campus cult indicating the desire of the serious young to find literary symbols for their own growing problems.

Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh, which was written by 1885 but not published until 1903, remains one of the greatest examples of the modern bildungsroman. Philosophical and polemic as well as moving and comic, it presents the struggle of a growing soul to further, all unconsciously, the aims of evolution, and is a devastating indictment of Victorian paternal tyranny. But probably James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), which portrays the struggle of the nascent artistic temperament to overcome the repressions of family, state, and church, is the unsurpassable model of the form in the 20th century. That the learning novel may go beyond what is narrowly regarded as education is shown in two remarkable works of the 1950s: William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954), which deals with the discovery of evil by a group of shipwrecked middle-class boys brought up in the liberal tradition, and J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951), which concerns the attempts of an adolescent American to come to terms with the adult world in a series of brief encounters, ending with his failure and his ensuing mental illness.