Henry Fielding, the author of Tom Jones, once famously defined the novel as a “comic epic in prose.” This turns out to be a surprisingly negative definition, when you think about it. A novel is prose, you see, because it’s not poetry. It’s an epic, since it’s not a lyric; novels tell stories rather than set moods. And it’s comic mostly in the sense that it isn’t tragic; the novel as an art-form wants to end with more weddings than funerals.