The novelist Luis Goytisolo, from the years of the Transition, collected his essay-literary articles in The Future of the Word (Taurus, 2002). A work, precisely, in which some of the themes that in this essay reach their full development are already emerging. But only here, in Nature of the novel, the author raises and develops the fundamental aspects to which the title alludes. What is that literary genre called novel, what we understand today as such? When it starts? What are its origins and characteristics? What are the direct and indirect factors that promote its formation as a gender, the even unconscious components that are in its gestation? Why now seems to have entered a crisis? Questions and answers, in some cases, that will become evident to the reader and that, however, nobody has asked until now. As an example, the distinction that Goytisolo establishes between biblical and evangelical novelists, according to the author in question, is closer - without even formulating it - to the narrative model either of the Old Testament or of the New; almost a game. It is an essay written by a novelist, similar to those written by Valéry, Huxley or T. S. Eliot, and which Goytisolo values ​​so highly. And if the best critics are often mediocre novelists, novelists and poets can become excellent critics as they perceive problems from within.