Part II: What is the Modern(ist) Novel?

Belief in the novel as form

Last week we began a serialized release of a paper by Indirect Books Publisher—and L’Esprit Literary Review Editor—Dan White. Originally written for the American Literature Association Conference in Chicago this month, the essay considers the form of the novel over the long 20th Century, specifically looking at the legacy of Modernism and its current status today. Does Modernism continue to exist, or have terms such as New Modernism properly replaced it in the ongoing understanding of what the novel can be? If you missed Part I, check out here.

“The Novel, Perpetual: Modernism and Contemporary Literary Form” will be published in the Summer 2026 Quarterly of L’Esprit, after being realised in four parts here. The essay examines Lucy Ives’ novel Life is Everywhere, along with her essay “The Weak Novel,” which is particularly apt as we enter the finalist stage of our Clarissa Dalloway Prize, judged by Lucy herself.

Part II runs through some thinking by Woolf and Eliot on the issue of form and the novel, before opening up the conversation around Life is Everywhere. It asks: what is the point of novels, and maybe of art?

We hope you enjoy Part II, below. Thanks so much for your support!

The Novel, Perpetual:
Modernism and Contemporary Literary Form
D. W. White

II. L’Œuevre

First let’s modify that fresh definition of High Modernism I suggested a couple of paragraphs back: an (internal) refusal of artistic convention for the sake of (external) artistic expression. By this revision I aim to spotlight an essential facet of Modernism in the early part of the previous century; the fact that its unease with the status quo in the given artistic medium—and, thereby, its attempts at doing something else—originates from within that status quo, as internal to the convention. What exactly does this mean, and why does it matter?

For the High Modernists, the work they sought to do in the form of the novel, story, or poem was indelibly linked with the Victorian literature against which they rebelled; their revolution depended, like all revolutions, upon the status quo antebellum. In Tradition and the Individual Talent T. S. Eliot argues that a poet must posses, indeed cultivate, a “historical sense [which] involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence”…one that “makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his own contemporaneity.” From within this knowledge of “tradition,” then, the poet can do something new, and “the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past.” This leads him to a marvelous formulation of the way art exists in relation to time:

What happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new.

We might think of this as a formulation of “literary ancestry,” a term I have introduced to my graduate students in other courses, something essential to thinking of oneself as an artist, a writer. As Eliot points out, a new artwork inevitably engages with that which has come before it even while emerging as its own thing, a sui generis art-object that reaches back to that tradition and grasps it. The essential element for our purposes is that what becomes the challenge to artistic convention emerges, again, from within that very convention; it displays and even celebrates a deep comprehension of the modes and styles that came before it, while simultaneously asserting that those methods are not our methods, not now.

Woolf’s liquid entanglement of the aesthetic with the ontological in Modern Fiction recognizes something similar when she asks, “Is life like this? Must novels be like this?” Her point in that essay is that the technology of the novel has become outmoded; the liturgy no longer fits with the belief: “Whether we call it life or spirit, truth or reality, this, the essential thing, has moved off, or on, and refuses to be contained any longer in such ill-fitting vestments as we provide” (287). There’s a distinction to be found in this passage of Modern Fiction between, we might say, fiction that is “realist” and that which is “life-like,” which for Woolf hinges more on less on the rendering of consciousness and the inner lives of characters.

In this essay and others (especially Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown) can trace, however, a similarly robust commitment in Woolf to an appreciation of and engagement with the literature that came before her as found in Eliot’s essay. We can see, in other words, that Modernism originally positioned itself as a movement seriously invested in the art that came before it—and, it’s not hard to suggest, after.

So why does this matter for us, and our attempt to understand the form of the novel in the current day? Besides recognizing an engagement with the temporal scope of literary tradition that has always been baked into Modernism—and which, therefore, offers a configuration of the movement, or term, that is best understood not as temporally locked into a strictly delimited area—a focus on internal challenges to artistic convention equips us with a more pliable hermeneutic in our attempts to locate certain contemporary novelists in relation to both their peers and the High Modernists glossed above. Are writers such as Lucy Ives, Lucy Corin, and Emily Hall best understood in a grouping with others (something that a “New Modernism” framework would maintain), or can we see something else happening, a trend distinct from most 21st century fiction, one that elaborates an animating continuum in the novel form?

Earlier I said I’d like to conceive of Modernism as the avant-garde realized as a “formal commitment to form,” which is dangerously near becoming tautological affection unless we step down on it some. As will hopefully become clear, my troubles stem from the fact that I find a specific group of novelists to be doing something legitimately avant-garde in a manner not found in most contemporary fiction, such that (I argue) their work is more appropriately understood as Modernist in their retaining an investment in form that mainstream publishing, by and large, has rejected.

The most well-known novelist whom I’d place in this avant-garde camp is Lucy Ives, who is perhaps on the border of the mainstream, and to the extent that she is, represents a nice exception to prove our rule. She recently won a Guggenheim—which isn’t necessary an indication of being “mainstream” but does illustrate her increasing prominence—and the arc of her career illustrates something about how publishing works in this country, in that her novels have become progressively more avant-garde (“weaker” in her terminology), something she’s been able to get away with, so to speak, as she’s found success. Her most recent novel, Life is Everywhere, is perhaps the most effective example of what I mean by “formal commitment to form” in defining the avant-garde and, thereby, Modernism. For context, let’s borrow Ives’ definition of a “weak novel” from her essay of the same name:

It is a novel that only weakly consents to participate in the conventions of genre, that is always about to—and sometimes does—fail to be a novel at all. This is, I want to show, an important quality for a literary work to have—the quality of weak identification, or even total disidentification, with its own type or genre. This effort, rather than being destined for failure, is in fact fundamental for the flourishing of the novel form.

In other words, a weak novel is an unconventional one, the type often called “experimental,” in ways that are foundational to its understanding of itself, qua novel. This last point is the one I’d like to run with; Ives’ expression—that the weak novel “reflects on its own status as a novel”—fits what I want to say about my affective tautology.

Life is Everywhere is a reckless novel, in that it seems to be careening from idea to idea, beginning with a 10-odd page rundown of the history of botulism before we meet anything like a character. Even there, though, and throughout there is a focus, an artistic vision being realized, one that comes in via the voice—the idiomatic narration which grounds the novel even as it, at times, elides the reader’s full comprehension of its scope. A commitment to formal innovation appears in Ives’ novel as the conviction with which she leans on various, and new, narrational techniques to do something in her book, to accelerate whatever claims it wishes to make about the world—or, more broadly, render the type of fictive world it wishes to realize—such that, simply, the form emerges as content. What I mean is, certain novelists approach The Novel first as an art form, then as a vessel for whatever socio-cultural or discursive sequence that might be of interest. That is to say (as we say in workshop), the style in a sense comes before the story.

Now, this does not mean that Life is Everywhere is “all style and no substance,” or that there is no plot, or anything like that. There is in fact quite a bit of plot, giving it a systems-novel legacy. Erin Adamo is a deeply stressed grad student in Manhattan, locked out of her apartment with only her bag, which contains a few manuscripts and other errata, and proceeds to become the star of the show: we move through the contents of her bag as Ives reproduces Erin’s own novella, her novel, and her advisor’s monograph before the night is through. So we have plot, or narrative—fictive events—in fact quite a lot of them. But in Life is Everywhere it is form that serves as the engine for the novel qua art-object; qua novel. Ives seems to be interested in working out an idea for what the novel could do, in the sense of its artistic properties and parameters, much more so than she is interested in telling the tale of Erin-the-Grad-Student. (If the opposite were the case, she’d just tell us the story, straight up). It is a book which jealously guards its medium.

Here’s the rub: this, it seems to me, is why novels exist. Of course there is a necessary discursive (as narrative) component to novels, because they are constructed of a medium that can only (cogently) operate as, well, discourse: language communicates something from one person to another person (or maybe a dog). But literary fiction novels are not solely, or even primarily, vehicles of discourse; they are art-objects.

We know this is true because if they were meant mainly to communicate, they’d be much better at it. We further know this because there are other, far more efficient, entities in the world that are also made up of language which do communicate quite well: journalism, reportage, directions on the street from a friendly stranger, restaurant menus, an email from your boss, the weather app on your phone, instructions from a pharmacist or a doctor, traffic signs, opening and closing times on a shop window, didactic placards in an art museum, notes you take down during a meeting to remember what was said. All of these, and many more, are instances of language, as cohered into an object, meant to communicate something directly, precisely, and simply. None of these things are art, which is what a novel is, which is not about communication but is instead about expression.

This distinction has been deeply, and wildly, misplaced in mainstream literary publishing, which is interested in two things: how well a book will sell, and how well a book communicates a feel-good message, which in turn means how well it will sell. It is not difficult to see why novels that are interested in themselves as procedures of artistic discovery, then, are largely rejected by corporate publishing. It is a rare writer who can break through that streaked and thumb-printed lid of glass, and the ones that do virtually always have sufficient name recognition (be it because of prior work or some other reason) to ensure their books will, nonetheless, sell. However, many people—those who work for these publishing houses and others, such as commentators and critics—are invested in seeing mainstream fiction as “experimental,” a concept which has retained its credibility and caché from the days of the Salon des Refusés and all that followed, from Impressionism on down.

Hence, in my read, arguments for things such as “New Modernism,” which feels to be born from an anxiety to locate some sort of worthwhile artistic innovation in a sea of fiction that is diametrically opposed to it. Ironically, we don’t need to make any such prefixes. We simply need to start reading the books that are sustaining the avant-garde right now; we need only to stick with the Modernism that has never left us. To bring us back to our main point, a formal commitment to form—crafting novels that employ form as an end to itself, that see themselves as novelistic art-objects via the prism of form—is both inherently incompatible with the chief concerns of mainstream American publishing and is an animating, invigorating impulse found in 1920’s High Modernism as much as in, say, Life is Everywhere.

Thanks for reading. Come back next week for Part III—and in the meantime, stay critical!