The Disruptive Novel

When I was a high school student, I was often sent to the principal because I was a ‘disruptive’ student, because I challenged the teacher’s premisses, rebelled against my uniform, and the way things were done. I doodled in my workbook, turned blots into illustrations, wrote stories instead of essays. I was punished back then for my behaviour, but nowadays ‘disruption’ is a positive word, and maybe these days I would have been regarded as the Uber or Amazon of the classroom, someone who challenged the status quo and found a new way of doing things. Disruption is a good thing, challenging us to constantly re-invent things, be innovative, undermine tradition, get ahead of the game.

The novel has been the naughty student of the classroom, disruptive from the very beginning: the very definition of the ‘novel’  as a ‘new’ thing is that it constantly reinvents itself, is innovative by its very nature. Disruption is what the novel does.

The history of the novel is a history of disruptive literary behaviour, its first appearance an affront to the elitism of the exclusive sacredness of literary texts. The printing press democratised the written word, and the novel was born, touting individualism, common people as heroes, and soap opera style narratives: the first novels were gaudy romances. And then the novel by its very nature began to disrupt itself: Don Quixote rebelled, ridiculed the premises of the Romance novel, and posited a more realistic view of the world. And so it began: If Robinson Crusoe feted individualism and capitalism and entrepreneurship, and colonial expansion of the glorious British Empire, Gulliver’s Travels, (literally) belittled such concepts, mocked the pettiness of political life. If Samuel Richardson’s Pamela rewarded virtue, then Fielding’s An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews parodied its cultural pretensions.

And so on. The realist novel disrupted by the modernist novel, which was in turn disrupted by the postmodernist novel. Nowadays, it is fashionable to declare the novel dead, but it stubbornly rises again over and over in ‘novel’ iterations, as an anti-novel, a un-novel, but always a new thing. Why? It seems the novel mirrors our ceaseless attempt to define ourselves as humans, describes our restlessly churning ‘human condition’, mirrors our ever-expanding consciousness. As soon as we think we have nailed these things down, the novel escapes, disrupts our definitions, moves on, spits out its critics. As the brain grows new dendrites, make new connections, reconfigures itself, so the novel constantly reconstitutes itself, eluding prophecies of doom: the printed novel, film and television and social media were predicted to make the novel redundant, the eBook was supposed to kill off the hard copy, but the novel twists and turns and survives. More than 180,000 titles are published each year in Britain alone, compared to China’s 450,000, and the USA’s 300,000. People are still reading the novel; the novel is still reading people’s ever growing consciousness.

What critics often mean when they say the novel is dead is that the serious literary novel is dead (Will Self: ‘The novel is dead [this time it's for real], The Guardian, May 2^nd, 2014; Tom Gatti: ‘The slow death of the literary novel’, New Statesman, January 2018), and that what we now call the novel is a tasteless lacking in nutrition McDonald’s pulp genre fiction burger. But literary fiction is reinventing itself constantly, making itself new. Experimental Pulitzer and Man Booker prize winners are also number one best sellers, pushing boundaries; and even genre fiction, that conservative formulaic embarrassing literary fictional brother, is disruptive and radical too.

For example, I write across genres and recently I have been writing crime horror. Nothing disruptive there, surely? But my novel is a palimpsest of Agatha Christie, an intertextual Poe, playing off and parodying earlier forms of the horror story. And what is also disruptive here is that I am being published not by a mainstream crime publisher, but an independent ‘garage band’ publisher, husband and wife team who have now cornered the Amazon market and have become the leading independent crime publisher in Britain, pushing out crime best sellers every week, chalking up millions and millions in sales, harnessing the needs of a readership still hungry for the new, for the sensational, the radical and the disruptive.

The novel is more stubbornly alive than ever. We can send it out of the classroom, punish it, but it will never conform,

or keep quiet, or behave itself.