Puritans and Picaros

Michael Schmidt’s The Novel: A Biography is “a brief life of the novel in English.” The biography is told mainly through novels and by novelists—these last, in Ford Madox Ford’s phrase, “artist-practitioners … men and women who love their arts as they practice them.” The Novel is dependably old-fashioned; not only is it bigger than a Victorian three-decker, but it is literate, often elegant, and never obscure. Schmidt thinks commentary should introduce readers to books and enrich reading, a view akin to Dr. Johnson’s belief that “the only aim of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.” Never does Schmidt treat the genre as an armory, reading selectively and pulling paragraphs out of context in order to bolster theoretical and sociological arguments. Novelists belong, in Jonathan Franzen’s words, to a “virtual community” of the quick and the dead. Reading a novel in ignorance of its antecedents and literary kinfolk diminishes the experience, often confining the reader to the moment and reducing mulling to the platitudinous and superficial.

Schmidt begins his study with Mandeville’s Travels, the wildly popular fourteenth-century picaresque travel book. Narrated by an Englishman and stitched together with grand lies, guffawing bawdry, and imaginary conversations, the book enjoyed an enduring influence upon travel narratives. In travel books, as indeed in fiction and nonfiction, lie-ability is an asset, not a liability. The first “full-blown English novel,” Schmidt reckons, is, however, Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), an episodic tale describing the often bloody and salacious doings of Jack Wilton, a one-time page. “A writer’s country is a territory within his own brain,” Virginia Woolf wrote in 1905. Schmidt’s brain, or better perhaps his taste in books, is capacious. But, as a decades-long diner on literature, despite sampling seasoned starters like Mandeville and Nashe, he prefers the caloric and protein-rich to the lite—that is, what seems intellectual, the sort of books that cognoscenti praise as must-reads, but which people in the provinces, where the papers don’t publish book reviews, often start books but don’t finish them.

Age determines endurance and preference. This review would be very different if I were writing in the fullness of my thirties. But in my seventies I am a diminished mental and physical creature. I do not have muscles enough to stack Proust and Tolstoy on my bedside table. Just the prospect of rereading Pynchon, Gass, or DeLillo causes me acid reflux. I now prefer slight antacid books and agree with Gerald Gould’s assertion that “I know no virtue dearer or warmer than silliness, and nothing nearer to Heaven than joy.” In John Buchan’s Huntingtower the young Dickson McCunn reads novels not because they peeled the rind from the human psyche and allow him to glimpse the inner workings of heart and mind but because they give him material with which “to construct fantastic journeys.” Last week I reread Charles Boardman Hawes’s The Dark Frigate, a children’s book published in the 1920s describing the swashbuckling adventures of Philip Marsham on The Rose of Devon in the seventeenth century. The tale was improbable and silly but enjoyable. And after finishing the story I did not imagine outlandish journeys or ponder humanity’s labyrinthine ways; instead I immediately fell asleep and slept soundly through the night, something itself that now smacks of the fantastic. Not only does age change one’s capacity for appreciating the important, but it reduces the memory of past readings. “Time moves in one direction, memory in another,” William Gibson wrote in Distrust That Particular Flavor. At the senior center a person shuffles quickly from one doctor’s appointment to another while memory stumbles creakily. “That we should wear out by slow stages and dwindle at last into nothing,” Hazlitt wrote, “is not wonderful, when even in our prime our strongest impressions leave little trace but for the moment, and we are the...