Some Non-Novels (1)

I have no intention of quibbling over definitions of the novel. Such matters have a habit of turning into cat-fights – and I value what little hair I have. Suffice it to say that a fair amount of literary productions are called novels simply for the sake of it. It’s a magic word, ‘novel’ is: tack it to any old piece of writing and people seem a little more inclined to take it seriously. Even if you never thought of your work as a novel, nor wrote it as if it was one, you may find yourself musing over whether to call it one. After all, it’ll make things much easier during dinner parties when the woman with the pretty teeth asks you what you’ve written. ‘Some stuff’, won’t pass muster – and you know it. ‘Oh, just a novel’ will sound mildly better – and who knows, she may even forgive you for staring at her premolars.

In this spirit, I ought to be celebrating people brave enough to eschew the ‘novel’ word (or any major ‘category’ for that matter) and I will do this, I promise, in due time. Before then, however, I would like to rest, like the indolent feline, on a couple of examples kicking around my own fireplace – both of which have dared to shelter under this heinous word: one through the fault of its author, the other through the fault of, well, me.

The first is none other than J-P Sertin’s so-called ‘experimental novel’ p.52. Even without pushing it through the critical mill to see if it fulfils the correct criteria, I think we can probably some say with confidence that this piece of writing is not your usual novel. So why pretend to be a novel at all? Is it simply because no word currently exists to describe a collection of one big text consisting of fifty-two smaller texts purporting to be part of fifty-two even larger non-existent texts? What is wrong with plain ‘fiction’? Too bland, perhaps? It is as if Sertin has settled on ‘novel’ simply out of exasperation; in anticipatation of the inevitable. We’ll all be pigeonholed eventually – so why not pigeonholes ourselves and be done with it? Well, indeed. Still, it’s somewhat sad to see the man who once created his own, albeit small, literary form (I refer, of course, to Intercutting) scurrying to someone elses’; cuddling up to a term that I think, idealist that I am, he doesn’t really need. Sertin is a writer. Calling himself a novelist won’t make him a better writer.

But who am I to cast stones? After all, did I not allow my own publishing-house to market the work of the late great Yevgeny Nonik as a set of novels? True, the same publishing-house also released Sertin’s work. But then, seeing as Sertin has always existed in a state of relative sanity, the choice of whether to call his work a novel or not came down to him. In Nonik’s case (a mental case) it came down to me. And, let’s be honest, I choked. I would have done better to have call his work the ‘ramblings of a madman’ – for this, essentially, is what they are (which is not to deningrate them – they remain an incredible literary product). Instead, I plumped for novel; splitting his great unending sentence into two, I thought manageable, chunks.

Ha! What was I doing? Nonik cannot be managed. He cannot be categorised. He was not, is not a novelist. And more fool me for trying to make him one. More fool me…