![]() ![]() ![]() Clarissa played a part in domesticating the form, in erecting the dry stone walls of realism, but it still very much belongs to the rougher age. ![]() A novel could be a lawless hotchpotch of philosophical dialogues, melodrama, borrowed stories and crude farce. You just have to acclimatise.Ĭlarissa is a product of the Wild West era of the novel, when the form hadn’t quite been fixed yet. It’s about a rape, which arrives about a thousand pages in. It’s in epistolary form, a mode of storytelling that resolutely declines to come back in fashion, even in an online age. It’s 1500 pages long for a start and over the month I read it, I developed aches and pains from lugging the thing about. If Clarissa is a neglected read, it might have brought some of that neglect upon itself. This is a guest post by novelist Rob Palk. ![]()
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