The Novel Was Built to Contain the World

What Happened to the Novel?

How would Moby-Dick be pitched today?

You could call it a maritime adventure, a philosophical novel, a religious allegory, a workplace novel, a natural history of whales with a homicidal captain at the center. Somewhere along the way, somebody would ask for the comp titles.

The exercise is funny because the categories fail almost immediately. Moby-Dick contains all of those things and keeps going. Melville follows Ishmael onto a whaling ship and finds capitalism, race, labor, friendship, God, madness, obsession, metaphysics and death waiting for him there. The novel expands because human experience expands.

The same problem appears if you try to reduce Crime and Punishment to crime fiction, or The Brothers Karamazov to a family saga or murder mystery. Those descriptions are accurate as far as they go. They simply do not go very far.

The novel once assumed that it could.

It could begin with a person and follow that person wherever life led: into family, religion, politics, money, history, philosophy, violence, work, faith, madness, love. The private and the public belonged to the same human world, so the novel moved between them without needing to explain why.

Somewhere along the way, we began asking it to stop sooner.

That interests me because the novel is, at heart, an excavation of human longing. People want love, belonging, safety, recognition, freedom, meaning, transcendence. Those desires begin intimately, but they do not remain private. They lead us toward other people, institutions, beliefs, markets, religions, political movements and systems of authority. They become the places where the world gets inside us.

Power understands this very well.

Power hides in the cracks of human longing.

That is its great advantage. It rarely approaches us as naked domination. It offers something we already want. A political movement offers belonging. A religion offers transcendence. A market offers security or status. An institution offers recognition. A strongman offers certainty. The transaction works because the desire comes first.

This is precisely where the novel has something almost no other form can match. It can inhabit longing before the person who feels it fully understands what it is. It can follow that longing as it becomes attachment, belief, loyalty, surrender, action. It can stay inside the marriage or the family wound as long as the story requires, then follow the same hunger when it moves into a church, a corporation, a university, a political movement or a state.

If we stop the novel at the front door, we stop halfway through the excavation.

Much contemporary literary fiction has become extraordinarily accomplished at the intimate scale. It knows the marriage, the affair, the family wound, the private grief, the workplace, the self. Those are essential human territories. They are also the places where larger forces first take hold.

Yet the moment a novel follows those forces outward, a different set of anxieties often appears. Politics can begin to feel too political. Philosophy too philosophical. Plot too commercial. History too historical. Large claims too ambitious. Ideas too didactic.

The novel that once swallowed the world learns to behave itself.

Why?

I have been asking that question inside my fiction for longer than I realized.

At the beginning of The Narcissism of the Sacred, Isabel Markson, a Yale professor, is explaining the contemporary novel to her students. One of them challenges her. He points to writers such as Hermann Hesse, whose novels could range across politics, philosophy, history and civilization. Why, he asks, was that possible then and apparently suspect now?

Isabel explains that the form has changed. The contemporary novel has become more enclosed, more bounded by individual consciousness.

He keeps pushing her.

More like memoir?

Yes, she says. Something like a fictionalized memoir.

Then she hears what she has just said.

The important thing is that Isabel does not begin by questioning the narrowing of the novel. She defends it. She is smart, sophisticated and entirely capable of explaining the rules because she has absorbed them so completely that they no longer feel like rules. They feel like the natural boundaries of the form.

Then a manuscript enters her life and shatters the entire defense.

The manuscript refuses to remain enclosed. It reaches into her family, into history, into secrecy, desire, complicity and power. As Isabel follows it, she begins to discover that the limits she had attributed to literary form were also limits on what she had allowed herself to see.

That is one of the ways power works. Its strongest boundaries are often the ones we stop recognizing as boundaries. Eventually we simply call them reality.

001-054 approaches the same problem from another direction. Whitman Kessler wants to write the novel his imagination gives him. Yet everywhere he turns, he encounters assumptions about what kind of writer he is, what material belongs to him, what voice sounds authentic, what kind of book can be marketed, praised, rewarded or understood.

Nobody ever sits him down and explains the rules.

He encounters them anyway.

That is partly because the rules no longer need anyone to announce them. A mature publishing system has to make books legible. Editors have to describe them. Sales departments have to position them. Marketing departments have to identify readers. Booksellers need to know where to put them. Success creates comparison titles, and comparison titles create expectations.

Every part of that machinery has an obvious practical purpose. But over time the machinery used to sell imagination can begin to influence imagination itself. Writers learn what kinds of books can be explained. They learn what kinds of ambition appear excessive, what kinds of intellectual range create difficulty, what kinds of stories travel cleanly through the system.

The cage becomes hardest to see once everybody has learned its dimensions.

Whitman’s refusal is simple. He does not accept that anyone else has authority over the range of his imagination.

Who gets to tell a human being what he is entitled to imagine?

That question reaches far beyond publishing, and it reaches into all of my novels.

My characters tend to begin with something private and recognizable. A historian wants to know what happened. A professor follows a manuscript. A novelist wants to write his book. A retired Navy SEAL wants his son, his dog, a cold beer and enough quiet to read the books he missed while people were shooting at him.

Then the world enters.

The historian’s search becomes a question about who acquired the authority to tell civilization what God said. The professor discovers that the silences inside her family belong to a larger history of power. The novelist finds institutions waiting to make his imagination legible. The retired SEAL discovers that the love of his son has placed him directly in the path of a political religion built by a billionaire.

The novels grow because the lives grow.

That is what I mean when I say I write big.

I mean that I keep following the character.

Our moment gives me little reason to stop. Power now moves easily among politics, technology, capital, religion, media and private life. Artificial intelligence enters work and creativity. Billionaires command resources once associated with governments. Political movements reach directly into individual consciousness through devices people carry in their pockets. Markets, institutions and ideologies shape how people understand freedom, belonging, identity and truth.

Power has become vast without becoming distant.

It has become intimate.

And if power hides in the cracks of human longing, then the novel has to be free to follow it there and follow it back out again. Otherwise we end up trying to understand ourselves with one hand tied behind our back.

The marriage matters. The wound matters. The loneliness matters. The desire matters.

The next question matters too.

What finds us there?

Who learns how to use the loneliness? Who offers belonging to the alienated person, certainty to the frightened one, meaning to the lost one, freedom to the person who feels powerless?

The novel was built to follow those questions wherever they lead.

The novel was built to contain the world.

Why did we teach it to stop?

Damned good question. Why did we teach it to stop?

Because somewhere along the way we began asking the novel to make itself legible before we allowed it to be free.

Publishing needed categories. Editors needed to explain books to sales departments. Sales departments needed to explain them to booksellers. Marketing needed an audience. Success needed comparison titles. Writers learned what traveled easily through that machinery and what did not.

Gradually, the machinery moved upstream.

The categories used to sell novels began shaping the novels we imagined. The boundaries of the marketplace began to look like the boundaries of literary form. Writers learned the dimensions of the room before they entered it.

We handicapped ourselves.

The world kept getting larger. Power moved deeper into technology, capital, politics, religion, identity and private life. Human longing remained just as vulnerable to seduction as it had ever been. Yet the novel, the form best equipped to follow longing into all of those places, increasingly learned to stop at the places easiest to recognize and describe.

I think we can ask more of it.

The novel can begin inside a marriage and end inside history. It can begin with grief and find politics waiting there. It can follow love into religion, loneliness into ideology, ambition into power, imagination into the marketplace. It can move wherever human longing moves because that is where human beings live.

The novel was built to contain the world.

The world is still there.