`A Small Tale, Generally of Love'

In his magisterial Dictionary of the English Language, Samuel Johnson famously defined a novel as “a small tale, generally of love,” and for his day he was not mistaken. Though Johnson knew Don Quixote, Clarissa and Tom Jones – inarguably novels, to our way of thinking – he deemed most of the lengthy prose narratives of his day “romances,” and rightly so. They were slight, evanescent things, of dubious worth and now forgotten. We would dismiss them as genre fiction – the Harlequin romances of the 18th century. The novel as we know it, viewed through the prism of realism (as that slippery notion has shifted over the last two and a half centuries), existed only embryonically. It’s strange and exciting to consider that a literary form is not a given, any more than a species is preordained, and that it could have evolved in very different directions. Johnson had doubts about realistic fiction, finding it morally dubious. He preferred the essay. His most novel-like invention – Rasselas – more closely resembles an allegory, and what a beautiful piece of work it is. I remember the first time I read it, 35 years ago, and I was scoring so many memorable sentences that I gave up my pen because I was underlining more lines than not. And that’s part of my point, I suppose: The long history of the novel is an elusive cabinet of wonders, from Rasselas to Tristram Shandy -- any damned thing novelists wish to make of it, and readers are willing to accept.

Such thoughts occurred to me as I’ve been rereading Letty Fox: Her Luck, one of my favorites among Christina Stead’s novels. Each of her books is so different from the others, in effect she recapitulates much of the novel’s history. Her masterpiece remains The Man Who Loved Children but Letty Fox, her 1946 novel set in New York City, has been reissued by New York Review Books Classics. I’ll suggest the special flavor of her novel by quoting its first and last sentences:

“One hot night last spring, after waiting fruitlessly for a call from my then lover, with whom I had quarreled the same afternoon, and finding one of my black moods on me, I flung out of my lonely room on the ninth floor (unlucky number) in a hotel in lower Fifth Avenue and rushed into the streets of the Village, feeling bad.”

Letty is forever flinging and rushing, as the novel’s final sentence confirms:

“I have a freight, I cast off, the journey has begun.”

A lovely, affirming, open-ended way to end a novel – by not ending it. Saul Bellow, who thought Stead was “really marvelous” and deserved a Nobel Prize, similarly constructed The Adventures of Augie March. It seems a novel can bee as big and sloppy and life-grabbing as Letty Fox (or Augie) and still be a great work of art. The form is infinitely elastic, and we merely ask that it be interesting. Tim Parks, the English novelist (I have read his Judge Savage, which is very good), contributes an admiring introduction to the NYRB Classics edition of Letty Fox:

“If every form of narrative representation is essentially a convention, a pact between writer and reader as to how experience can be talked about, then it is only natural that the finest authors should be uneasy with some aspect of that convention, eager to bend it closer to the grain of their own lives. What Stead most resisted in traditional narrative was and easy formulation of shape and direction, any neatness, `the neatly groomed little boy in sailor collar,’ she called it, speaking disparagingly of the fiction the publishers liked most. In contrast, the exuberance and manic extension of the world that she depicts in Letty Fox denies any possibility of order. The work is rich and capricious, its descriptions dense, vital and highly particularized; its only overall drift is that of Letty’s growing up.”

Any literary form that can comfortably contain Letty Fox, Correction, The Belly of Paris, Albert Angelo, Scoop, The Age of Innocence and Auto-de-Fe is worthy of our devotion, despite Dr, Johnson’s well-intended misdiagnosis.