There is no "film novel" category, that's a bit of a stretch, mon frère. That whole list of supposed types of novels is a stretch. Sure we say "campus novel" occasionally, but that's just shorthand for a young writer's coming-of-age or first novel (we don't refer to Francine Prose's Blue Angel as a "campus novel," for instance, though what else would it be?).
What Rothfeld was really getting at with her bon mot was the idea that centering a subcategory of fiction around a new technology or a tool for communication, such as the internet, is shallow. There, I said it. The internet is a part of life, like sex and death and lunch and politics and family strife and Aristotelian metaphysics. But to make it the heart and soul and thrust of your novel is shallow.
Americans love to obsess over the shallow, the ephemeral. I'm sure in fact that plenty of forgotten American authors DID actually write "phone novels" back when the phone was cool (and I also read somewhere of a "telegraph novel" once laboriously written using that limiting piece of tech). Doing so is all about trying to hitch your wagon to the latest thing, as if writing a great novel were strictly about what exactly is happening this very exact second what's cool what's happening what it is, daddio. This obsession is frankly what makes so many "good" American novels absolute shit by global-historical standards, and our "great" novels truly inimitably unique.
Late to the game on this one, admittedly, but it seems to me like the 'internet novel' as genre could be most readily compared to the 'systems novel' that preceded it, mainly by way of contrast. Much ink has been spilled on how Pynchon and co pre-figured hypertext and Wikipedia and whatever else, eschewing old forms of community transmission of narrative in favour of the systems that grouped people together, but I think it's especially telling that the most of the novels which have actually arisen coeval with social media etc. are mostly very different.
The syntax is dislocated, dispersed maybe, but the narrative voice is more solidly unary than it has been in a long time, the singular perspective doling out judgement in aphorisms, which they call tweets. The social subject matter seems mostly to be that of domestic realism; interpersonal relations, social status, dialogues structured around conspicuous epigrams, etc.
Not a knock on domestic realism, obviously, but it's very different stuff to the radical break in the nature of the subject (or whatever it was) anticipated by the 'systems novels' and their fellow travellers.
There is no "film novel" category, that's a bit of a stretch, mon frère. That whole list of supposed types of novels is a stretch. Sure we say "campus novel" occasionally, but that's just shorthand for a young writer's coming-of-age or first novel (we don't refer to Francine Prose's Blue Angel as a "campus novel," for instance, though what else would it be?).
What Rothfeld was really getting at with her bon mot was the idea that centering a subcategory of fiction around a new technology or a tool for communication, such as the internet, is shallow. There, I said it. The internet is a part of life, like sex and death and lunch and politics and family strife and Aristotelian metaphysics. But to make it the heart and soul and thrust of your novel is shallow.
Americans love to obsess over the shallow, the ephemeral. I'm sure in fact that plenty of forgotten American authors DID actually write "phone novels" back when the phone was cool (and I also read somewhere of a "telegraph novel" once laboriously written using that limiting piece of tech). Doing so is all about trying to hitch your wagon to the latest thing, as if writing a great novel were strictly about what exactly is happening this very exact second what's cool what's happening what it is, daddio. This obsession is frankly what makes so many "good" American novels absolute shit by global-historical standards, and our "great" novels truly inimitably unique.
Late to the game on this one, admittedly, but it seems to me like the 'internet novel' as genre could be most readily compared to the 'systems novel' that preceded it, mainly by way of contrast. Much ink has been spilled on how Pynchon and co pre-figured hypertext and Wikipedia and whatever else, eschewing old forms of community transmission of narrative in favour of the systems that grouped people together, but I think it's especially telling that the most of the novels which have actually arisen coeval with social media etc. are mostly very different.
The syntax is dislocated, dispersed maybe, but the narrative voice is more solidly unary than it has been in a long time, the singular perspective doling out judgement in aphorisms, which they call tweets. The social subject matter seems mostly to be that of domestic realism; interpersonal relations, social status, dialogues structured around conspicuous epigrams, etc.
Not a knock on domestic realism, obviously, but it's very different stuff to the radical break in the nature of the subject (or whatever it was) anticipated by the 'systems novels' and their fellow travellers.