What does a novel look like? What form and structure constitute a novel? This is a question that has persistently lingered alongside the development of the form since its inception. The fact is that the original English-language novel bears little resemblance to today's standard conventional form. The real problem facing the novel is that there is no standard conventional form. It is a form for providing content that is in a constant state of evolution.
“We consider it one of the advantageous changes in the public opinion in letters, that the Novel has attained a rank in literature much above what it was some time ago allowed to assume. It was formerly looked upon as a kind of reading only fir for the idle among the young, who might skim over the pages of a novel in the moments of hair-dressing.”
The above is from a op/ed piece published in a British literary magazine in 1823. The reference to the “hair-dressing” is indicative not only of the lowly reputation of the novel at the time, but also its primary demographic. One can only wonder, of course, what those who dismissed what was then the newest form of literature on the market would think of a book like Karen Tei Yamashita’s I Hotel. Right there on the cover it says “A Novel” just in case there might any doubt. And why would there be doubt?
If one to randomly open the book to a page without purpose or intent, one might well think they had stumbled across the pages from a screenplay about Chinatown. Or, perhaps they might assume they had inadvertently picked up some kind of political manifesto. Elsewhere, readers could interpret a page as an example of experimental, almost stream-of-consciousness writing while throughout the book are pages and pages of good old-fashioned combinations of description prose and dialogue.
Now, that’s what a novel is supposed to look like! Right? The funny thing is that those very pages that readers even three decades into the new millennium still think of as the idea of what a novel is supposed to look like is exactly what some critics of the form were decrying against. Ironically, somewhat, it is those aspects of Yamashita’s novel that seem like renegade invaders from a work of non-fiction that more closely resemble the English-language novel as it began.
Ultimately, it is a worthwhile gesture for the author to have indicated to readers that I Hotel is “A Novel” right there on the cover. Because it is not readily apparent. Yamashita is another in a long and ever-growing list of authors who produced a work that extended the definition of what constitutes a novel. Take a minute to think about that. If someone mentions a poem, it is every easy to immediately visualize what that work will look like. True, not all poetry actually does look like, but it is easy enough to differentiate from a novel. The same holds true of stage drama, even that which is at its most experimental. Certain conventions are required to hold together the definition of being poetry or a play. While conventions can be pushed to the limit, in order to qualify as a poem or a play, the final result must be certain expectations.
The same does not hold true for the novel. It is a form of literature that by the dawn of the third decade of the millennium has pretty much reached the point where it is whatever a writer says it is. Equipped with eight years of research material, interviews with more than a hundred people, documents, photos and archival film, multiple storylines and enough major characters for two or three novels, there was nothing absolute in the decision that all this stuff necessarily had to come together as a novel. It could just as easily have turned out a non-fiction book, a documentary film, a graphic novel or a mini-series. Or something else entirely. That it did become a novel when it could have become any of those things and more says much about what the novel looks like today and the form and structure which constitutes the once-maligned ugly little sibling of poetry and drama.
