Is It Fiction? Or Is It “A Novel”
It’s odd how one person’s eye and mind can pick up on particular things which pass another’s by.
It was The Mrs who drew my attention to the current craze for labelling novels as novels. You know the kind of thing; The Nervousness of Clarissa Poole - A Novel (I just made that up, but now I want someone to write it). I hadn’t registered it as quite the epidemic it’s become.
The Mrs’ view is that no book of his is ever going to be so announced.
I’m aware that novels have always occasionally used this kind of labelling, but honestly, now I’m looking out for it, it really is a craze. I just spent a few minutes in Borders at lunchtime, and in their ‘New Fiction’ display, viewing from the top shelf down, of twenty books on five shelves, sixteen employ either ‘A Novel’ or ‘A Novel of…’ (A Novel of Pretentious Wank, one suspects.) And one of the other four is a collection of John Updike short stories.
It’s weirdly nannyish. As if people either don’t have the intelligence, wit or ability to work out what kind of book they’re looking at. OR it’s sheer pretension on the part of authors and publishers.
Is it just US editions, or has the craze got other countries in its grip?