Even though the novelistic genre does not get a good press from the French writers today, for Éric Chevillard, Pierre Senges and Antoine Volodine, to write against the novel is in fact to write quite close to it. Because they are novelists in spite of themselves since, to quote a provocative statement of the first, “soon, the term novel will permanently have become a synonym for book”, but especially because the forms they invent constitute variations on the novelistic genre they mistreat the better to renew it. The article explores the relations between the novel and the antinovel in the light of this contrapuntal practice, and shows that this notional couple only coincides incidentally with the one which contrasts the romance with the novel, and that the mimetic illusion is what constitutes the real stake for the antinovel, beyond its singular expressions throughout history. This shift allows for a reconsideration of the antinovel’s target as an abstract model, the contours of which are indirectly drawn by the antinovel, and thus expurgates the fossilized forms that tend to freeze the novelistic genre, like so many molts, in order to maintain the vagueness of the novel, which always keeps it alive.