It is Reality that is killing The Novel (5), or rather the transmutation of reality, not from one state of affairs to another, but out of itself altogether: “Reality is no longer realistic,” as Norman Mailer says in The Man Who Studied Yoga. There is some agreement about the change in environment to which The Novel is failing to adapt. It is on this evolutionary hypothesis that what David Lodge calls the sermons on the text “ Is the novel dying” (38) have become a preoccupation of criticism. Since it has become maladaptive, it is probably heading toward extinction, to join the dinosaurs. In criticism, however, instead of novels there appears something called “The Novel.” It behaves not as a genre but as a species: It has a line of evolution within which throw-backs like The Raj Quartet are discernible.
Robbe-Grillet’s In the Labyrinth and War and Peace). For such an ex post facto genre the exception proves the rule, and so deviations are readily accommodated: There are novels all in rhyme (e.g., Vikram Seth, Golden Gate), non-fiction novels that are meticulous reportage (e.g., Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood), and novels which are one-fifteenth as long as others (cf. One would think that all the books recognized as novels come to establish a genre: the fairly lengthy prose fiction. With respect to novels this perverse notion, that the times accredit the work rather than the work the times, takes potently concrete shape. It implies that citizenship in one’s time does not accrue by mere reason of date of birth but must be earned by passing a critical test: The honor of being here and now is bestowed by the craft of critics. And that is, of course, precisely what is illuminating in the dictum above. Consequently, if a novel was completed in 1975, it is a contemporary novel, and should be counted as such. Dates of existence give us the only hard ordering frame we have for the world in its going. Time serves us in no other way than as an imperturbable order of succession. What is wrong-headed is the prank played with chronology. It is, of course, meant to be a put-down, not praise. It has appeared twice in the pages of a widely-read weekly book review: The Raj Quartet is one of the longest, most successfully rendered works of nineteenth-century fiction written in the twentieth century.
I want to begin with a judgment of luminous wrong-headedness. The Raj Quartetby Paul Scott (1,032 pages, Everyman’s Library, 2007)
It has something War and Peace lacks: an evil presence of enormous pathos. The Raj Quartet is one of the longest, most successfully rendered works of nineteenth-century fiction written in the twentieth century.
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