Review: The Novel: An Alternative History

Hello all! A book review for you follows below. It's not mine, and the author would prefer it to be anonymous - though I'm sure would welcome any feedback. Either leave a comment, or email me and I'll pass it on.

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Just finished The Novel: An Alternative History by Steven Moore. How alternative? Well, this is volume 1 of 2, and it only goes up to 1600.

It's not a very deep work, but it's incredibly broad, beginning with ancient Egyptian stories, working through Babylonian myths, the Tanakh, Greek and Roman novelists, Irish myths, Arthur, Norse sagas, the Zohar, and the Renaissance; then it skips over, via Central America, to Indian, Iranian, and Arabic novels, Japan, and ends up in China with three of the Four Great Classical Novels. Stories grow off the pages like trees. It's a pretty amazing tour of fiction and mythology: he defines "novels" rather broadly, especially with the Ancient Near East stuff at the beginning. Even if he occasionally talks about books he hasn't read or haven't been translated into English, the breadth of reading is pretty impressive (and he refers to many more in footnotes), and popular as well as academic - he describes something as fanservice towards the end. He's also enthusiastic and insightful: describing "the novel" as primarily intellectual, rhetorical, and self-absorbed, rather than psychological or truthful. He likes lists, formal designs, and wordplay; for instance, he describes the heroes of Monkey by Wu Cheng-en as "Wu's Tang clan".

If you don't like lists, length, and style, you might not like it. It probably spends too long describing rather than analysing, and Moore's judgements are sometimes sloppy - he describes the end of an Egyptian story as like Kafka or Borges, and later that page as essentially realistic. His defence of the difficult/innovative novel sometimes leads him into the false dichotomy that anything easy to read is worthless. The sections on non-European novels are too brief compared with the European stuff, and it's a very masculine book, both in the sense that there are very few female writers and that Moore loves describing beautiful women and the men who have sex with them. His textual libido is a pain in the neck by the end, and his constant "maledictions against religion", as the index has it, are the same - and I agreed with most of it. Finally, the introduction, in which Moore clears himself some aesthetic elbow room, is too polemical.

Overall, though, I thoroughly recommend it. If there's a similar survey of stories from the whole world and most of history, I don't know of it (but please enlighten me if you do.) Nor can I say how complete it is; in fact, sometimes it seems to have very sparse pickings indeed. It's not close reading or deep criticism, but it is a golden treasury of fiction that's left me itching to get my hands on some of the goodies he mentions.