Novel Notes

Novel Notes is a comic novel by Jerome K. Jerome, published in 1893 between Three Men in a Boat and Three Men on the Bummel. It is one of his strangest books in structure. The frame is that four friends, the narrator J plus his pals MacShaughnassy, Brown, and Jephson, have decided to write a novel together and are meeting regularly to discuss plot, characters, and method. Most chapters open with one of these meetings and then drift sideways into stories the friends tell each other to illustrate whatever point they happen to be making.

The novel they are supposedly writing never really gets written. The book is essentially a series of inset stories held together by the conversations about how a novel ought to work. Some of the inset stories are comic in the broad Jerome manner. Others are surprisingly dark. There is a famous chapter about a haunted bedroom and another about a cat called Stripes who is more or less the moral center of the book. The friends keep arguing about whether the heroine should be tall or short, whether the villain should have a moustache, whether the hero needs a tragic past, and the arguments are themselves the comedy.

What is interesting about the book is that it is partly a satire on the late Victorian novel as a form. Jerome was poking fun at the conventions of romantic fiction at the moment when those conventions were being most rigorously followed. The four friends keep proposing plots that sound exactly like the popular three volume novels of the day, and the gap between their grand ambitions and the modest stories they actually tell is where the comedy lives.

The book runs about two hundred and fifty pages and reads quickly. It is not as polished as Three Men in a Boat but it is more inventive in structure and shows Jerome trying something different. For readers who already love his other comic work, Novel Notes is the most experimental of the early Jerome books and worth reading for that alone. It pairs naturally with Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow, which uses a similar conversational drift.