'Authentic' novels

A redaction of a novel, by Hollywood or Broadway or Reader's Digest or a paraphrase or any other means, is known not to be a novel, not to be authentic. A novel can be dropped or outmoded or rediscovered by readers, but it can't be changed into something else ...

Jane Smiley, 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel

The comment above, made by Jane Smiley in her wonderful book 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel, raises questions in my mind. Is what she says really true?

I don't think there is any question that a novel adapted for a movie or a stage play is no longer a novel. The story may be changed into a screenplay or a play, yet the novel itself still exists, unchanged. One can both read a novel and watch a movie adapted from that novel.

Reader's Digest seems more problematic. Is a condensed novel no longer a novel? Is it no longer the same novel? How about if the novel is condensed by the reader, who skips over descriptions or, as in the case of Moby-Dick, all those chapters about whaling that have little to do with the narrative? Do such readers fail to read "the novel" because, like Reader's Digest, they condensed what they read?

Does a novel translated into other languages, with totally different words, somehow cease to be "the novel?" How about if an editor cuts out large portions of a novel, such as happened with Thomas's Wolfe's work? Or what if a novelist changes something in a novel from one edition to another, as has sometimes occurred? Is one edition more "the novel" than another?

Novels, it seems to me, are "changed into something else" all the time — by editors, publishers, readers, translators, magazines that serialize them and even by the authors themselves. Scholars can make a career out of trying to determine which version of a novel is the authentic one.