concretely place authentic values in the work because novels have no place for abstract ideas — it would be like putting a square peg in a round hole. The problem becomes, then, taking the abstract/ethical part of the novel, which only exists in the writer's mind, and making it the essential element of a novel which cannot accommodate it. This means, of course, that the novel starts off degraded from the beginning because abstract authenticity cannot be represented in the novel). How is the hero to search for this authenticity? Sociology of the Novel Here Goldmann ends his discussion of the novel form and its perplexities, and moves on to discuss the perplexities of the sociology of the novel. The authenticity question will return after this short summary of the history of the novel in sociology. As Goldmann explains, the first part of novel writing, from its birth until approximately World War I, the novel was a social chronicle of the time period. If sociologists wanted to understand the time period in which the novel was written, they had only to look at the content of the novel, which provided information of customs, traditions, dress, mannerisms, technology, beliefs, etc. of the time. The belief was, and still is, that the novel reflects the time period in which it was written—it simply cannot help this. This assumption worked well until World War I. Many novels after this watershed moment simply did not support the belief that a novel's content can give clues about the society in which it was written. These new novels had absurd worlds and an abundance of reification (to treat something abstract as if it were a real thing), and were hardly reliable sources for understanding the society of the time. How to reconcile this new novel with the belief that novels mirror society? The Structure of Modern Society Sidenote: Another related problem that came up was why these novels only appeared after World War I. Marx was explaining reification in the late 19th century, after all, and his commentary related to events that happened even earlier. Why does reification only appear in novels in the 1910s? Goldmann, of course, provides an answer to this problem (he calls it a hypothesis). Rather than looking at the content of the novel, sociologists need to look at the form of the novel and its relation to the structure of individualistic