Randall Jarrell's Definition of The Novel

Randall Jarrell on the novel: 

...a novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.

From his introduction to Christina Stead's The Man Who Loved Children, one of the books on my list of classics not of but about childhood. Here's the context:

There is no book you can lend people that all of them will like.

But The Man Who Loved Children has been a queer exception. I have lent it to many writers and more readers, and all of them thought it good and original, a book different from any other. They could see there were things wrong with it -- a novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it -- but they felt that, somehow, the things didn't matter.

To have this happen with a book that was a failure to begin with, and that after twenty-five years is still unknown, is strange. Having it happen has helped me to believe that it is one of those books that their own age neither reads nor praises, but that the next age thinks is a masterpiece.

But I suppose I'd believe this even if every borrower had told me it was bad. As Wordsworth and Proust say, a good enough book in the long run makes its own readers, people who believe in it because they can't help themselves. Where The Man Who Loved Children is concerned, I can't help myself; it seems to me as plainly good as War and Peace and Crime and Punishment and Remembrance of Things Past are plainly great. A few of its less important parts are bad and all of its more important parts are good: it is a masterpiece with some plain, and plainly negligible, faults.

I call it a good book, but it is a better book, I think, than most of the novels people call great; perhaps it would be fairer to call it  great. It has one quality that, ordinarily, only a great book has: it does a single thing better than any other book has ever done it. The Man Who Loved Children makes you a part of one family's immediate existence as no other book does.

Comments

[Sara O'Leary]

What about Henry James's What Maisie Knew for that list. I need to go back and look at that one.

[Steph]

Must read that one! Thanks Sara.