'Decidedly Not a Novel,' Writes Warren Motte

At World Literature Today, Warren Motte reviews Emmanuel Carrère's chronicle "Limonov" and accidentally offers up another usable definition of what a chronicle is: "decidedly not a novel (though it makes many gestures in the direction of the novel.)"

Motte's review is lukewarm, which may have something to with the fact that "Limonov" is indeed not a novel. He laments: "The fact that ["Limonov"] should win the Renaudot testifies to how embattled the very idea of the novel is on the contemporary cultural horizon, where in recent years that form has been influenced in key ways by genres once imagined to be quite distinct from it: biography, autobiography, testimony, travel writing, historiography, journalism, and so forth."

Actually, all those genres that Motte mentions, when married to novelistic strategies, tend to yield chronicles. The chronicle genre is undoubtedly on the rise, but this rise is taking place incognito, under the smuggling mantle of the novel, confusing (and often dismaying) reviewers and critics.

Motte is yet another critic sorely in need of discovering the term "chronicle" and of labeling a work as such when he finds it to be such, no matter what the publishers claim.