More than a world made, the novel is an instrument of world-making. The subject matter it curates from everyday life-its disproportionate focus on, say, the terrors of growing up or fantasies of marrying up-announces (and reinforces) a given collective's preoccupations. Though usually read in quiet solitude, the novel is thus a functionally extroverted genre that performs the public service of communicating unspoken norms and initiating newcomers (such as children or foreigners or simply baffled adults) to the workings of an abstruse social world. Because it moves in tandem with a fluctuating demographic, it is transitory in nature even as it models the seemingly stable and normative. And that work of adaptation, as both Lukâacs and Smith note, takes place through its tireless renovations of form"--