NIGEL BEALE NOTA BENE BOOKS

Culled from the introduction to Great Novelists and their Novels, here’s what Somerset Maugham said defined good novels :

1. A theme so broadly human that it is interesting to men and women of all sorts.

2. The story should be coherent and persuasive, should have a beginning, middle and end, which should be a natural consequence of the beginning

3. The episodes should have probability and should not only develop the theme, but grow out of the story.

4. The creatures of the novelist’s invention should be observed with individuality, and their actions should proceed from their characters…it is all the better if the characters are in themselves interesting.

5. The author is fortunate if he can see his characters through his own individuality, and if his individuality is sufficiently out of the common to give them an illusive air of originality.

6 Just as behavior should proceed from character, so should speech. The dialogue should serve to characterize the speakers and to advance the story.

7. The narrative passages should be vivid, to the point and no longer than is necessary to make the motives of the persons concerned and the situations in which they are placed clear and convincing.

8. The writing should be simple enough for anyone of ordinary education to read it with ease, and the manner should fit the matter as a well-cut shoe fits a shapely foot.

9. Finally a novel should be entertaining. This is the essential quality, without which no other quality is of any use. No one in his senses reads a novel for instruction or edification. If he wants these he is a fool if he doesn’t go to books written to instruct and edify.

This post represents one sortie in a carpet bombing campaign designed to clear the literary terrain of cant, expose and explain in detail the reasons for studying canonical literature, and establish an ‘objective’ criteria for  determining aesthetic value.

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