Reconsidering Literary Snobbery: A Reflection on What Makes a Real Novel
By
David Roth
23d ago· 4 min readenOpinion
80/100
Golden Brown
Bagelometer↗
Pulled from the oven just right. Trustworthy, fact-dense, deeply satisfying.
Score80TypeopinionSentimentneutral
Summary
A reflective, personal essay about the author's college-era literary snobbery and narrow definition of what constitutes a "real novel." The author recalls believing novels were exclusively about unhappy married men (often English professors or businessmen), and how this limited perspective was challenged over time. The piece uses Robert Coover's "The Universal Baseball Association" as a potential counterexample or touchstone for expanding literary horizons.
Key quotes
· 3 pulledThere was a time, during a personal zenith of certitude and obnoxiousness that fits perfectly over my last years of college, when I was sure I knew what a real novel was, and what it was for.
As I understood it from the books that I read and read reviews of, novels were about when you were a man in an unhappy marriage.
Sometimes you were English and sometimes you were a college professor and sometimes you worked in The Business Industry, but that was about the size of things as far as I could tell.
There was a time, during a personal zenith of certitude and obnoxiousness that fits perfectly over my last years of college, when I was sure I knew what a real novel was, and what it was for. As I understood it from the books that I read and read reviews
