How Novels Work

by John Mullan

Drawing on his weekly Guardian column, "Elements of Fiction," John Mullan offers an engaging look at the novel, focusing mostly on works of the last ten years as he illuminates the rich resources of novelistic technique.

Mullan sheds light on some of the true masterworks of contemporary fiction, including Monica Ali's Brick Lane , J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace , Don DeLillo's Underworld , Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections , Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time , Patricia Highsmith's Ripley under Ground , Ian McEwan's Atonement , John le Carré's The Constant Gardener , Philip Roth's The Human Stain , Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated , and Zadie Smith's White Teeth . He highlights how these acclaimed authors use some of the basic elements of fiction. Some topics (like plot, dialogue, or location) will appear familiar to most novel readers, while others (meta-narrative, prolepsis, amplification) will open readers' eyes to new ways of understanding and appreciating the writer's craft. Mullan also excels at comparing modern and classic authors--Nick Hornby's adoption of a female narrator is compared to Daniel Defoe's; Ian McEwan's use of weather is set against Austen's and
Hardy's.

How Novels Work explains how the pleasures of novel reading often come from the formal ingenuity of the novelist, making visible techniques and effects we are often only half-aware of as we read. It is an entertaining and stimulating volume that will captivate anyone who is interested in the contemporary or the classical novel.

Genres: Nonfiction, Writing, Literary Criticism, Books About Books, Literature, Criticism, Academic

346 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

John Mullan is a Professor of English at University College London. He was General Editor of the Pickering & Chatto series Lives of the Great Romantics by Their Contemporaries, and Associate Editor for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. A regular radio broadcaster and literary journalist, he writes on contemporary fiction for the Guardian and was a judge for the 2009 Man Booker Prize. John is a specialist in eighteenth-century literature.

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Reviews

[Paul Bryant · Rating 4 out of 5]

How novels work is that they haunt you like a ghost, wind about your limbs like an anaconda, shake you like the wind shakes the barley, burn you like the eyes of a cop with too many bad stories to tell, charm you like next door's underwear hanging on the line to dry, electrify you like the Soviet Union 1920 to 1925, orbit you like cats in boats on the Sea of Tranquillity, make you come back for more like a tragic ex, and little Lolita will give you the third degree, Seymour Glass will look out of your mirror, and Ishmael will say well – you know what to call me. What do I call you?

George Eliot said

If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.


This book is an intellectual autopsy of novels, what bits go where, why they work, why they don't – the title, the epigraph, the prologue, the framing device, the inadequate narrator, skaz, direct addresses to the reader, omniscience (what kind of science is that?), free indirect style (thank you Jane Austen), character, motive, antihero (oh Flashman), real people (hello Dr Crippen, bonjour tristesse), roman a clef (who is really who? really? wow) and fleuve (sweet Thames fleuve softly), genre, thrillers, romance, satire, magical realism, historical, voices, dialect (wotcher mate - ugh), dialogue, languages, translation, telephone conversations (there's one in Proust!), cliché, swearing, structure, time, chapter titles, or not, inset narratives, parallel narratives (I always remember how to spell parallel because there are two parallel lines in the middle of the word), story (what happens), narrative (how you get told about what happens), plot (what made what happened happen), not all novels have plots, not all novels have stories, prolepsis (ooh, I'd see a doctor dearie), details, location, weather, meals, brands, style, parataxis (they won't get you home), paragraphs (there's an eleven-page paragraph in Kafka), diction, amplification (thank you Philip ROTH), parenthesis (huh? doesn't say which parent), hyperbole (Money - Money - MONEY), pastiche (Possession), heteroglossia (Ulysses), streams of Woolf, letters (My dear Count), emails, similes, ekphrosis, manes (no that's just horses), names (I have real problem with very silly names and I'm looking at Thomas Pynchon), coincidences (of all the gin joints), literariness, symbolism, Russian dolls, false endings (like in I Got You Babe), and real endings (like now).

[Sam Zucca · Rating 4 out of 5]

I do like a lot of literature, but strangely books about books are rarely as interesting or as compelling as the books themselves. If you've ever had the misfortune of picking up a big bulky guide to the literary canon, or flipped through the introduction to a penguin classic, you've probably experienced the very dry writing style of an english scholar.

So beginning to read, John Mullan's How Novels Work, I was apprehensive of delving into some of the technical and over-pretentious writing I'd associated with most books about books. And indeed, there are a lot of words that were entirely new to me upon reading them, chapters such as 'Ekphrasis', 'Heteroglossia', 'Parataxis' or 'Skaz', all of which are sure to help you out in your next game of scrabble. But despite this, there is an inherent accessibility to the book which I appreciated greatly.

John Mullan, in case you don't know, is a professor or English and columnist, and the book was sprouted out of various articles he wrote for The Guardian newspaper. The book is split into eleven chapters, and each of these are divided into even smaller sections of specific details in novels - each of these are about 2-10 pages and are very digestible. You get very concise yet informative sections on the use of swearing, chapter titles, villains, emails, false endings and aspects of the novel that you wouldn't even have thought to look at. The blurb of the book includes some of these specific ideas, asking questions such as 'Why is Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time printed in sans serif font?' Yeah, I had no idea either.

This book is also works really well for recommending future novels to read, and I myself have added more than a few to my Goodreads, although do be aware that many of the books are discussed and torn apart in great depth (I in fact haven't read the whole book technically, since I skipped the parts detailing the plot of Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone which I'm reading right now).

The one flaw I'd give to this is that it can be jarring to find out an entire plot of a novel in a couple of lines, in such an offhand way, and for a few of the books I failed to really take the examples in. Also I suppose structurally there isn't much that really holds it together, it has a lot of depth, but not much scope. I dipped into this book in and out over the course of 5 months, and it never really grabbed me enough to read chunks of all in one go - but to an extent that's fine, and it's great to use as a reference book. I have in fact quoted this in my A level coursework, so it has already proved useful in studying.

[Zaki · Rating 3 out of 5]

Literary criticism can be done by anyone who likes books.

[Lobstergirl · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mullan's book examines these aspects of novels: beginning, narrating, people, genre, voices, structure, detail, style, devices, literariness, and ending. The book feels overlong because he concentrates too much on a large handful of contemporary works (which had little interest for me) like The Hours and Possession. I couldn't figure out how a guy who writes a book column for The Guardian in every instance misspelled Bret Easton Ellis. Once I noticed that, other little errors began to nag me, such as: "Its 15-year-old autistic narrator Christopher Boone is autistic..." This is definitely How Novels Work lite.

[n* Dalal · Rating 4 out of 5]

How Novels Work is an exciting read; Mullan explains the many techniques novelists utilise to convince us of their story. I love reading novels, I know the writers I love are brilliant, but Mullan gave me the tools to know why. As well as brief notes that illuminate the history of the novel, Mullan uses classics like Dickens and contemporary standouts like Franzen to explicate the numerous overlapping considerations and choices writers make at every turn. He celebrates their successes, he's disappointed in their failures, and by the end, you'll be a smarter reader. You'll get more out of reading than you did before.

And you'll know why The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time is in sans-serif font.

[Emmy B. · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's pretty much what it says on the tin. If you want to know how the different elements that make up a novel work, why they exist and how they are utilised by authors, this is the book for you.

My two problems were that, firstly, it contained too much spoilerific information about books I still intend to read (but it's possible to just skip those paragraphs so no harm done). This meant that large parts of the chapters were devoted to describing how some author used letters, epigraphs or quotes for example. This was fine, in that it led to a demonstration of how these elements are used, but it meant that for large parts of the book you just read summaries of parts of other books. The analysis was interesting, though.

The second problem I had was that it was very much focused on literary novels. I would have liked more on genre fiction. There's a chapter on genre, but it's literary genre, really. No mention of fantasy or sci fi, and while romance was there, it was the A.S. Byatt type romance, so not really what I would have liked to know about.

Not for everyone.

[Kathleen Flynn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Even seasoned novel readers will learn something new in this book.

[Mohammed · Rating 4 out of 5]

I haven't read Lodge's Art of Fiction nor similar books, so no space for compariaon here. The book was useful in terms of updating my fiction-related terminology (hetroglossia, skaz,...), and opening my eyes to subtle novelistic techniques (free indirect speech, false ending...).

The author divided the book into main chapters, each chapter into titles. Each title was elaborated in an average of three pages. There were definitons, examples from celebrated novels and little criticism here and there. Some terms were only exemplified with no definitoion, so it was somehow left to your discretion to absorb them. It was a tough job to get intoduced to a term by going through half a page of events from some novel to get the message. Maybe Mullan wasn't able to provide clear-cut definitions for some techniques because they had no collective explanation. Besides, due to the fact that I read it as one chunk with no intervals, I kind of lost a great deal of my attention. My mind was all over the place because of moving abruptly from a novel to another, being thrown into new series of actions then taken away suddenly, introduced to characters then leaving them behind in a hurried manner...

I learned a lot from "How Novels Work", and I'm sure it is going to be a good reference in my library. It is good for students of literature and would-be novelists.

[Benjamin Kass · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5

I wanted a deeper look at novel technique, and the book delivered. More accurately, it should be called "How (English) Novels (after 1700) work", but the book knows its a narrow focus and that's fine. What has me annoyed are multiple instances of poor judgement that call the actual critical faculty of the author into question, a tendency to get into the weeds without saying much of substance, and the narrow repetition of the same 7-13 novels as an example. The more I've thought about this after finishing it, the less satisfied I've become. If you want to know how novels work, read what a novelist has to say about themselves and others. There's plenty to find, and the points they make are more incisive than anything I found here.

[william ellison · Rating 4 out of 5]

Many hands

John Mullan tells us he is placed between academic literary criticism and the book club equivalent, almost like an interpreter and his How Novels Work bears out this self assessment.
He follows fairly intuitive divisions of concern such as Beginning,People, Genre , Style which he deals with in a basic analytical way, sometimes introducing more formal academic notions. The pleasure of the book is the wide array of references to contemporary, paired with more classical works with which he exemplifies his readings, often ending a section with a compact summary/judgement.
A comfortable, informative read.

[Mugren Ohaly · Rating 2 out of 5]

Mullan uses examples from only a handful of novels to talk about certain aspects of writing. However, he does not elaborate on or give his own explanation for any of them. This is a book filled with excerpts from novels that ends up not teaching the reader anything. Uninformative and a waste of time.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Useful, ground-level reading of how the novel works for the general reader with no special training in how to read fiction. Although, at first blush, it may sound condescending it isn't.

How the Novel Works is filled with useful advice for the neophyte reader who wishes to speak coherently about books they've been moved by.

Recommended

Rating: 4 out of 5 Stars

[Aisling · Rating 4 out of 5]

now feeling well equipped for my, slightly spontaneous, module choice of writing prose fiction !!!!

[Lisa of Troy]

English Literature Critisim Recommended Reading List at Oxford According to Benjamin McEvoy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1Q2J...

[Kevinjwoods · Rating 1 out of 5]

Should perhaps be subtitled "And how how Criticism fails".
Rather than explain how novels work this explains how novels that few people read work, eschewing the idea of showing how popular novels and those that the vast majority of readers will be familiar with this concentrates almost entirely on 18th/19th century fiction that is now read mostly by scholars, or on the sort of critically acclaimed novels that most people give up unfinished long before the end. By concentrating almost entirely (there are mentions of Nick Hornby and Ian Fleming) on these authors and novels all he seems to do is explain the thought processes behind the tales which are designed merely to please the critics with the way they use these tropes rather than actually using these tropes unconsciously.
This blinkered criticism causes other problems as well, for example where a modern reader would consider the term romance to include Mills and Boon, the modern genre of Paranormal Romance or Fifty Shades of Grey an its ilk this author appears never to have heard of this definition and decides rather to use an old fashioned definition that was out of date by the 19th century. His lack of knowledge of modern novels shows in other ways like his astonishment that nobody is using email in novels, perhaps not in the type of novels designed to win the Booker or other Literature prizes but I can assure you that elsewhere email is frequently used. There is also a complete lack of mention of crime (save for a brief mention of Raymond Chandler), Horror, Science Fiction or any genre at all.
In short this is the sort of book that appeals to the sort of critic that would never be caught dead reading something on the bestseller list and can't quite understand why a 500 page wok on the history of a dressmaker in the court of Queen Victoria isn't the holiday reading of everybody.

[Magnus Buchanan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Yeah, pretty good: eminently sensible rather than crazily inspired. Similar to David Lodge's excellent Art of Fiction, with more up-to-date titles, several of which I'll probably now seek out. A couple of gripes though. Firstly, there are some howling spoilers of Keyser Soze/Darth Vader proportions which come totally unannounced - given the range of contemporary titles, it's hard not to get caught out - couldn't Mullan have slapped a warning on some sections? Secondly, this book has come out of a column which dealt with many of the books one-by-one - in extrapolating his ideas into a thematic format, there's a bit of shoehorning of the books to fit. Still, glad I read it.

[Jibran]

Paused on 220.

Will return to it in a while when I have digested your critical commentary of various works, their language, their style and form, and all that makes one work stand apart from its peers and predecessors.

[Sean Condon · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very interesting read. Although I do wish he'd write a follow-up, How Novels Sell.

[C.T. Yen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really helpful! Learned a lot from it.

[Kelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good read for any aspiring novelist.

[Lorna Bo · Rating 3 out of 5]

feels like reading 11 guardian articles in a row (not necessarily a bad thing)

[Carrie Mitchell · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm finding this book invaluable for my MA course, as well as for experimentation with my own writing. Whilst I accept the opinions contained are those of just one man, albeit a learned man, Mullan gives us, the reader/writer/both, the fundamental tools with which to find our own truths and revelations about whatever we read. When I bought the book, I noted that some comments (Amazon) were disappointed that the author had omitted sizeable chunks of inspected novels from his more recently revised edition. However, despite being unfamiliar with many of the selected texts, I found Mullan to have provided ample context, in addition to the examined passages, to form a good idea of what his points are. The instruction was clearly written in everyday English, not weighted down with highbrow "insider" jargon, and arranged in convenient, bite-sized chunks which are comfortably digestible. In fact, as my lovely Mum has professed an interest in doing some creative writing herself, I bought her a copy, too! At under £5 per paperback copy, what's not to love?

I do recommend this informative text to others, but only as long as they don't expect to be wet-nursed. The aim is to impart methods and processes which you can apply to fiction beyond the scope of those mentioned in the book. So tool up, people. Learn and use!

[Philip Athans · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was our Fantasy Author's Handbook Group Read for November 2024…

Well, I didn't not like it.

It's actually an extremely basic overview of elements of the novel in general, illustrated by, frankly, tortuously long examples from a solid list of novels ranging from the very old (17th century) to books that were quite recent at the time of this book's writing.

I have to admit to skimming, even skipping many of the lengthy examples by about the two-thirds mark, but then I have been living in the writing, editing, and publishing of novels for decades, so not a lot of this needed to be extensively explained to me.

Still, I got several pages of useful notes, which you'll surely see pop up in blog posts, etc. That said, I'm happy to call this all's well that ends well.

[autumn ☆ · Rating 3 out of 5]

“15-year old autistic narrator Christopher Boone is autistic…” … you don’t say 💀💀💀💀

Good layout of subheadings but I think it was written by mr mullan as he was falling asleep. It was kinda repetitive with the examples he used which meant he stated the same points about the same books again and again, and most of the book is recounting the plots of said books which is so boring if you’ve read them. It also never gets directly brought back to the main question of how novels “work”, and the analysis is abysmal, if even included. Great book if you are an alien and have never read a novel in your life though.

[Bobbie Darbyshire · Rating 4 out of 5]

Expanding on his weekly column in the Guardian, John Mullan dissects the writer’s craft in a series of mini essays on various aspects, starting with 'the title' and ending with 'the postscript', with examples from modern novels and classics. He aims to bridge the ‘gap between academic literary criticism and the common reader’. Engagingly easy to read despite tackling some complex ideas. It’s interesting to know that some of the things I’ve done have fancy names (which I have of course promptly forgotten!)

[Cooch · Rating 5 out of 5]

Useful book on The Novel

Exceptional book, in that it is thought provoking, and well argued, but not overly didactic; in that there is room to debate some of Mullan's analysis and conclusions. Of course the reductionist approach, plays down , and perhaps distorts, the holistic effects of writers' choices and usages in novels.

[Rue Baldry · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a solid little book which plods its way, very readably, through various elements of novels, using a good range of examples from a variety of writers. Useful, if not scintillating, it's a good overview, with no revelations but some good explanations.

[John Wharton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Accessible overview of how novels work. Uses mostly novels from the early 2000s. Like taking an English literature class without any ancient texts or having to write essays.

[Michelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

I needed to read the book as part of my course at Oxford University. While the book is very informative I found it to be a little long winded. That's personal POV.

[Tim Pieraccini · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good; docked a star only because the genesis of it as multiple articles is evident in some repetition!