Anovel is a piece of prose fiction of a reasonable length. Even a
definition as toothless as this, however, is still too restricted. Not
all novels are writtten in prose. There are novels in verse, like
Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin or Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate. As for fiction,
the distinction between fiction and fact is not always clear. And what counts
as a reasonable length? At what point does a novella or long short story
become a novel? André Gide’s The Immoralist is usually described as a novel,
and Anton Chekhov’s ‘The Duel’ as a short story, but they are both about
the same length.
The truth is that the novel is a genre which resists exact definition. This in
itself is not particularly striking, since many things – ‘game’, for example, or
‘hairy’ – resist exact definition. It is hard to say how ape-like you have to be
in order to qualify as hairy. The point about the novel, however, is not just
that it eludes definitions, but that it actively undermines them. It is less a
genre than an anti-genre. It cannibalizes other literary modes and mixes the
bits and pieces promiscuously together. You can find poetry and dramatic
dialogue in the novel, along with epic, pastoral, satire, history, elegy, tragedy
and any number of other literary modes. Virginia Woolf described it as
‘this most pliable of all forms’. The novel quotes, parodies and transforms
other genres, converting its literary ancestors into mere components of itself
in a kind of Oedipal vengeance on them. It is the queen of literary genres in
a rather less elevated sense of the word than one might hear around Buckingham
Palace.