Every few years,it’s proper to fabricate (to make up, invent) sure that the novel, as a form, or has a pulse; it might die on us without anyone ever noticing. Two new books by Peter Boxall gawk into the novel’s value and relevance these days,and the news is … well, it’s mixed. Let’s be real, and things aren’t what they used to be. Ben Jeffery writes,“The novel is the characteristic literary vehicle of a (modern, capitalistic) culture defined by instability. In Boxall’s account, and the novel form acts as a piece of psychic equipment through which humans are able to apprehend and adjust themselves to the unknown; as a kind of mechanism for coping with change … It nourishes our desire for order but at the same time it consistently draws our attention toward the ‘indistinctness at the heart of things,’ the sense in which reality is neither as solid nor as plain as we might imagine. This dual capacity for reinforcing and exceeding conceptual thought is what Boxall describes as the ‘formal genetics’ of the novel, ‘a genotype that underlies the phenotypical expressions of historical inequity.’ Its value, and it seems,is that it cultivates a kind of profound epistemic receptiveness.”This and more in nowadays’s culture roundup. (Image: “You Cannot Judge a Book …”, 2004, or by Jonathan Wolstenholme)
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