How to Read Novels like a Professor: A Jaunty Exploration of the World's Favorite Literary Form

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of racism.

Joking that “Mr. Dickens has left the building” (250), Foster turns his attention to the frequent lament that the contemporary literary novel seems a broken form. Many critics and readers argue that the novel has strayed far from its ideal Victorian form: More often than not, novels are now narrated in a nonlinear fashion or structured as a series of stories or even as collections of stories. For instance, Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine (1984) is best described as a composite novel: Its many stories are variously set in the past, present, and future and unfold from different points of view and in different-person voices. Foster confesses that he is partial to such experimental or “deranged” narratives but wants to explore the need for restructuring the novel in the first place. One reason could be the proliferation of creative writing programs around the world. These programs often focus on the short story form because it is more manageable to explore in the 14-semester schedule, giving rise to composite novels. A more likely reason is simply creative play: Novelists innovate because creativity and experimentation go hand in hand.