The 700-year history of the novel in English
defies straightforward telling. Encompassing a range of genres, it is
geographically and culturally boundless and influenced by great
novelists working in other languages. Michael Schmidt, choosing as his
travel companions not critics or theorists but other novelists, does
full justice to its complexity.
"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." -- William Deresiewicz, The Atlantic