Paul Hoover’s The Novel is a booklength poem written in response to the author’s experience of having his first novel, Saigon, Illinois (Vintage, 1988), published after a mere six months in the making. Hoover examines the privilege of the novelist from the poet’s point of view, asking in both astonishment and disappointment: why is the novelist at once the most lordly and common of authors? A mosaic in organization, the poem’s thirty parts mix, among others, Shakespeare and deconstructionist “shoptalk” with an account of Graceland when Elvis was alive and a gloss of the mass-market paperback of James M.…