The Purpose of A Novel

Now I know I’ve touched on this particular subject in previous posts, but I have to ask the question again, “What is the purpose of a novel?” This is not necessarily related to another question, “Why have you decided to write a novel?” The second question can have various answers, many, if not all of them involving some personal agenda on the part of the writer or writers in question. But the answer to the first question, and in all truth, there really is only one answer (which I’ve supplied in this particular post already) is to entertain. Keeping this in mind, that a novel’s main—and in most cases nowadays—sole purpose, is to entertain, a writer should be able to approach a book with this decidedly singular agenda, abutting it and supplementing it with experimentation, lofty artistic objectives, or other personal goals, so long as the primary agenda remains in full frontal view.

A lot of writers lose sight of this “decidedly singular agenda,” placing everything before it, thus leaving their readers scratching their heads at the ridiculousness they’ve been mercilessly beset by. In a recent review, I criticized one writer for having written a few stories that were “absolutely vapid” and lacking plots. His best and only defense was that James Joyce was more or less accused of similar literary crimes—particularly those that concern stories without plots. This could have led to a lot of heavy-handed rebuttals on my part, not least the “how dare you compare yourself to . . . blah, blah, blah . . . albeit inadvertently?” line, yet I decided to digress, because I have no intention of belittling struggling writers. It’s neither my desire nor place to.

I said that to say this: Joyce, Faulkner, Nabokov, Pynchon . . . contemporary writers can use them as an excuse to apply their own brand of experimentation to literature all they want—as though these souls, by so doing, gave contemporary authors license to do so as well—but bear in mind that all of them experimented in various novels with the goal of entertaining their readers. And I believe all of them succeeded.

All of the aforementioned authors understood story dynamics, character, and language; they attempted to make every detail of their narratives interesting, despite the sometimes mundane nature of the action being described. Take Joyce’s Ulysses for instance. During a carriage ride—what could have easily been a dull, uninteresting narrative block—is pumped full with lyrical prose and vivid imagery, even with terse clauses and seeming half-phrases applied:

The carriage steered left for Finglas road.

The stonecutter’s yard on the right. Last lap. Crowded on the spit of land silent shapes appeared, white, sorrowful, holding out calm hands, knelt in grief, pointing. Fragments of shapes, hewn. In white silence: appealing. The best obtainable. Thos. H. Dennany, monumental builder and sculptor.

Passed.

On the curbstone before Jimmy Geary the sexton’s an old tramp sat, grumbling, emptying the dirt and stones out of his huge dustbrown yawning boot. After life’s journey.

Gloomy gardens then went by, one by one: gloomy houses.

Mr. Power pointed.

—That is where Childs was murdered, he said. The last house.

Joyce sets the scene for us, perfectly. Two words are used to paint an interesting picture: “Gloomy gardens,” what is essentially an antipode to our usual view of gardens. And gloomy houses follow; “gloomy” because we are to believe that someone could be murdered in one of them. And we do believe, because the imagery allows us to.

Much of the above language is almost poetic, and could stand to be read over and over again. One isn’t really concerned with plot when one is presented with language the likes of this. The beauty is in the details, and following a reading of Joyce’s work, I come away not only satisfied, but also entertained!