The first half addresses her title. She looks at the novel, in general, in 13 ways: its origins, its psychology, how it views history, how it approaches morality and so on. This is interesting stuff, and I will have much to say about her points in the weeks to come, and in fact I have already begun to do that.
The second half of her book consists of her reviews of the "100 novels" she mostly refers to in her first half. I put this phrase in quotation marks because she writes about many more than 100 novels. She writes about three P.G. Wodehouse novels as if they were one. Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, seven novels, is treated as one. I haven't done the math, but there may be 130 or 140 novels in all that she talks about in detail.
Many of these novels are ones you, like me, have never heard of, let alone read. Don Quixote is commonly regarded as the first novel, but Smiley puts it seventh on her chronological list. The oldest, The Tale of Genji, was written by an 11th century Japanese woman.
She doesn't choose the novels she necessarily considers the best. For example, she says she regards Our Mutual Friend as the best novel Charles Dickens ever wrote, as well as one of the best novels ever written, yet the Dickens novel she writes about here is A Tale of Two Cities. She includes Joseph Conrad's The Heart of Darkness, even though she regards as "a bad work of art."
Many of the novels on her list she has read multiple times. One wonders how she found the time, especially considering how many of her own novels she has written.
Whether one writes novels or just likes to read them, Jane Smiley offers much to ponder.
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