I think that the basic impulse of the novel is not that kind of utterance. It is not the lyric impulse. The basic impulse of the novel is narrative, stories. They want to tell you what happens if you make certain choices, what happens then, what happens then. And then what happens.
Novels are about human choices and the pattern of human lives through time.
No, nothing is outside of time. Poems use time They use time as music uses time, as part of the measure of the poem. But poems are not about time, in the sense of the novel. The novel's subject matter is time. Judy Grahn has said that a characteristic of working-class writing is that it piles up events within a small amount of space rather than spinning out the many implications of one or two events.