Michael Schmidt is Professor of Poetry at the University of Glasgow and a writer in residence at St John’s College, Cambridge. He is founder and editorial and managing director of Carcanet Press.
Given the fluidity with which [Schmidt] ranges across the canon (as
well as quite a bit beyond it), one is tempted to say that he
carries English literature inside his head as if it were a single
poem, except that there are sections in The Novel on the major
Continental influences, too—the French, the Russians, Cervantes,
Kafka—so it isn’t only English. If anyone’s up for the job, it
would seem to be him… Take a breath, clear the week, turn off the
WiFi, and throw yourself in… The book, at its heart, is a long
conversation about craft. The terms of discourse aren’t the
classroom shibboleths of plot, character, and theme, but language,
form, and address. Here is where we feel the force of Schmidt’s
experience as an editor and a publisher as well as a novelist… Like
no other art, not poetry or music on the one hand, not photography
or movies on the other, [a novel] joins the self to the world, puts
the self in the world, does the deep dive of interiority and
surveils the social scope… [Novels] are also exceptionally good at
representing subjectivity, at making us feel what it’s like to
inhabit a character’s mind. Film and television, for all their
glories as narrative and visual media, have still not gotten very
far in that respect, nor is it easy to see how they might… Schmidt
reminds us what’s at stake, for novels and their intercourse with
selves. The Novel isn’t just a marvelous account of what the form
can do; it is also a record, in the figure who appears in its
pages, of what it can do to us. The book is a biography in that
sense, too. Its protagonist is Schmidt himself, a single reader
singularly reading.
*The Atlantic*
[Schmidt] reads so intelligently and writes so pungently… Schmidt’s
achievement: a herculean literary labor, carried off with
swashbuckling style and critical aggression.
*New York Times Book Review*
If you want your books a bit quieter and more extensive
chronologically, then do try poet Michael Schmidt’s 700-year
history of the novel, The Novel: A Biography, which covers the rise
and relevance of the novel and its community of booklovers in a
delightful tale, not at all twice-told, that reminds us of exactly
why we read.
*Wall Street Journal*
A wonderful, opinionated and encyclopedic book that threatens to
drive you to a lifetime of rereading books you thought you knew and
discovering books you know you don’t.
*New Statesman*
The Novel: A Biography is a marvel of sustained attention,
responsiveness, tolerance and intelligence… It is Schmidt’s triumph
that one reads on and on without being bored or annoyed by his keen
generosity. Any young person hot for literature would be wise to
take this fat, though never obese, volume as an all-in-one course
in how and what to read. Then, rather than spend three years
picking up the opinions of current academics, the apprentice
novelist can learn a foreign language or two, listen, look and then
go on his or her travels, wheeling this book as vade mecum.
*Literary Review*
In recent years, while the bookish among us were bracing ourselves
for the bookless future, stowing our chapbooks and dog-eared
novellas in secret underground bunkers, the poet and scholar
Michael Schmidt was writing a profile of the novel. The feat itself
is uplifting. Bulky without being dense or opaque, The Novel: A
Biography belongs on the shelf near Ian Watt’s lucid The Rise of
the Novel and Jane Smiley’s livelier user manual, Thirteen Ways of
Looking at the Novel. Taking as his guide The March of Literature,
Ford Madox Ford’s classic tour through the pleasures of serious
reading, Schmidt steers clear of the canon wars and their farcical
reenactments. He doesn’t settle the question of whether Middlemarch
makes us better people. He isn’t worried about ‘trigger warnings.’
And he doesn’t care that a Stanford professor is actively not
reading books. Instead, with humor and keen insight, he gives us
the story of the novel as told by practitioners of the form. The
book is meant for ordinary readers, whose interest is not the death
of theory or the rise of program fiction, but what Schmidt calls,
in a memorable line, ‘our hunger for experience transformed.’
*Los Angeles Review of Books*
The Novel is one of the most important works of both literary
history and criticism to be published in the last decade… The
reason Schmidt’s book is so effective and important has to do with
its approach, its scope, and its artistry, which all come together
to produce a book of such varied usefulness, such compact wisdom,
that it’ll take a lot more than a few reviews to fully understand
its brilliant contribution to literary study… Here, collected in
one place, we have the largest repository of the greatest
novelists’ opinions and views on other novelists. It would take the
rest of us going through countless letters and essays and
interviews with all these writers to achieve such a feat. Schmidt
has done us all a great, great favor… Maybe the most complete
history of the novel in English ever produced… [A] multitudinous
achievement… Schmidt [is] an uncannily astute critic… Schmidt’s
masterpiece… Schmidt’s writing is a triumph of critical acumen and
aesthetic elegance… [The Novel] is a monumental achievement, in its
historical importance and its stylistic beauty… It is, itself, a
work of art, just as vital and remarkable as the many works it
chronicles.
*The Millions*
Rare in contemporary literary criticism is the scholar who betrays
a love for literature… How refreshing, then, to encounter in
Michael Schmidt’s The Novel: A Biography not a theory of the novel,
but a life. And what a life it is… Schmidt arranges his examination
both chronologically and thematically, taking into account the
influences and developments that have shaped the novel for hundreds
of years. The Novel is at once encyclopedia, history, and
‘biography.’ …[Schmidt’s] lyrical prose weaves together literary
analysis, biography, and cultural criticism… Another delightful
aspect of The Novel consists of the surprising and insightful
connections Schmidt finds among writers… The Novel is more
revelatory (and interesting) than a merely chronological account
would be.
*Books & Culture*
[Schmidt] is a wonderful and penetrating critic, lucid and
insightful about a dizzying range of novelists.
*Daily Beast*
Show[s] how much is to be gained by the application of unfettered
intelligence to the study of literature… Schmidt seems to have read
every novel ever published in English… This is as sensitive an
appreciation of Fielding’s style (all those essayistic addresses to
the reader that introduce each of the eighteen books of Tom Jones)
as any I’ve ever read. And what Schmidt does for Fielding he does
equally well for Ford Madox Ford, Mary Shelley, and (by my count)
about 347 others… [Schmidt’s] sensibilities are wholly to be
trusted.
*Open Letters Monthly*
I was left breathless at Michael Schmidt’s erudition and voracious
appetite for reading.
*The Tablet*
[Schmidt] has written what claims to be a ‘biography’ of the novel.
It isn’t. It’s something much more peculiar and interesting…
Illuminating and fascinating. And because the book makes no
pretense to objectivity, the prose is engaging and witty… [A]
marvelous book… If there is a future for encyclopedic books ‘after’
the internet, this is a model of how it should be done.
*Times Higher Education*
The title and the length of Michael Schmidt’s book promise
something more than an annotated chronology. This is not a rise of,
nor an aspects of, nor even a theory of, the novel, but a nuanced
account of the development of an innovative form… Schmidt’s
preferences are strong and warm. He admires a range of authors from
Thomas Love Peacock and Walter Scott to Anthony Burgess and Peter
Carey… The Novel: A Biography incidentally provides the material
for one to make a personal re-reading list.
*Times Literary Supplement*
[Schmidt] prove[s] his wide-ranging reading tastes, his ability to
weave a colorful literary tapestry and his conviction that the
novel is irrepressible.
*Kirkus Reviews*
If focusing on the events surrounding one novel isn’t enough, or is
too much, Michael Schmidt offers an eclectic variety in The Novel:
A Biography. At 1,160 pages, this hefty volume features 350
novelists from Canada, Australia, Africa, Britain, Ireland, the
United States, and the Caribbean and covers 700 years of
storytelling. But Schmidt does something different: while the book
is arranged chronologically, the chapters are theme-based (e.g.,
‘The Human Comedy,’ ‘Teller and Tale,’ ‘Sex and Sensibility’) and
follow no specific outline, blending author biographies,
interviews, reviews, and criticism into fluid narratives… This is a
compelling edition for writers and other readers alike; a portrayal
that is aligned with Edwin Muir’s belief that the ‘only thing which
can tell us about the novel is the novel.’
*Library Journal*
I toast a certainty—the long and fruitful life of poet, critic, and
scholar Michael Schmidt’s book, The Novel: A Biography. Readers for
generations will listen through Schmidt’s ear to thrilling
conversations, novelist to novelist, and walk guided by Schmidt
through these 1200 pages of his joyful and wise understanding.
*Stanley Moss*
Michael Schmidt is one of literature’s most ambitious champions,
riding out against the naysayers, the indifferent, and the purse
holders, determined to enlarge readers’ vision and rouse us all to
pay attention. Were it not for his rich and adventurous catalogue
of publications at Carcanet Press, and the efforts of a few other
brave spirits at other small presses (such as Bloodaxe Books) the
landscape of poetry in the U.K. would be depopulated, if not
desolate. He has now turned his prodigious energies to telling the
story of the novel’s transformation through time: a Bildungsroman
of the genre from a persevering and unappeasable lover.
*Marina Warner*
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