Toward the end of her 2008 essay “Two Paths for the Novel,” on the schism in contemporary literature between realism and conceptual fiction, Zadie Smith lists a few authors to be found in the middle. “At their crossroads,” she writes, “we find extraordinary writers claimed by both sides: Melville, Conrad, Kafka, Beckett, Joyce, Nabokov.”
Edwin Frank’s new book, Stranger than Fiction: Lives of the 20th Century Novel, is devoted to 30 such writers at the crossroads. His argument is that the 20th century saw the rise of a new kind of fiction that split with the 19th-century novel with its finely tuned plots and balanced casts of heroes and villains.
From Austen through Dickens to Hardy, that novel’s ascent mirrored the rise of representative democracy in Europe and America. Though realist novels continued to be written (and still are, by writers such as Smith herself, Jonathan Franzen, and Sally Rooney), the 20th-century novel, as Frank characterizes it, came to the fore in concert with societal disruptions, some of them salutary (women’s suffrage, racial emancipation, sexual liberation, decolonization), many others disastrous (world wars, genocides, technologically enhanced modes of destruction). In contrast to the “judicious realism” of the 19th century, Frank calls this new mode “emergency realism.”
Frank is a poet as well as the editor and founder of New York Review Books Classics, an imprint that for 25 years has revived distinguished literary works that have fallen out of print (I have contributed an introduction to one of these: Take a Girl like You, by Kingsley Amis), shepherded important new translations, and lately published daring and original works such as Benjamin Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World and Joshua Cohen’s The Netanyahus, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2022. He is neither an academic nor a novelist himself (he professes never to have harbored such an ambition), and his book is free both of the jargon now common in English departments and the rivalrous anxieties that might afflict a study by a fellow practitioner.
Proceeding in a loosely chronological order and divided into three parts (roughly before, between, and after the world wars), with a prologue devoted to Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground, the book is a hopscotch through masterworks, consistently pleasurable and often riveting, as literary history goes. Frank calls it a work of “descriptive criticism.” Formally, it reminds me most of the essays of J. M. Coetzee: appreciative readings of great (and often familiar) works that emphasize their literary qualities while retelling just enough of the story (plot being a secondary concern in most of these novels) with recourse to elegant biographical sketches and illuminating anecdotes.
Frank has a story to tell, one that is neither exactly a progress nor a rise and fall. Instead, we read of energies gathered, innovations achieved, consolidations accomplished. There are fascinating and unexpected pairings. H. G. Wells wrote science fiction that made speculative leaps from emerging social realities, whereas André Gide’s books were highly personal precursors to what we now call autofiction, but both authors put the frame of their narratives in view and so can be considered pioneers of modern metafiction.
Virginia Woolf and Ernest Hemingway, who disliked each other’s work (to the extent they are known to have read each other), both figure as consolidators of previous innovators: Hemingway of his mentor Gertrude Stein’s obsessive and at times seemingly “mad” focus on the sentence; Woolf of her (often disdained) rival Joyce’s formal uses of time as a structuring principle and stream-of-consciousness narration.
To my mind, the strongest chapters in Stranger than Fiction are those on Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, and Joyce’s Ulysses—three drastically different books that have in common the project of portraying the old order from the vantage of the aftermath of its destruction in the First World War—as well as the one on D. H. Lawrence.
Frank has a story to tell, one that is neither exactly a progress nor a rise and fall. Instead, we read of energies gathered, innovations achieved, consolidations accomplished, and responses to shocks.
Frank writes most passionately about Lawrence, perhaps in part because Lawrence, whom he calls “the Exception,” fits his thesis only paradoxically. His novels conform superficially to staple genres of the 19th century—Sons and Lovers, a bildungsroman; The Rainbow and its sequel, Women in Love, family chronicles—but defy them. Instead of following characters to see “the passage of time made sensible,” The Rainbow’s plot “determinedly goes nowhere” and is “little more than the biblical one generation cometh and another falleth away, its world at once mythic and immediate.” Myth is not the stuff of judicious realism.
Stranger than Fiction has a global scope if a largely European focus. Machado de Assis, of Brazil, and Natsume Soseki, of Japan, emerge as two of Frank’s most intriguing subjects, self-consciously plowing new tracks for the novel under the awareness that they are far from its zone of genesis. The book, which concludes with readings of V. S. Naipaul and W. G. Sebald, displays little interest in the form’s present or future. Frank mentions a classical-music critic who told him that “in the last 30 years or so there had been to his ear no significant developments in the music, something unheard of in all its earlier history. The same could be said of the novel.”
I’m not so pessimistic, but perhaps I’m more of a partisan of Donald Antrim, Don DeLillo, Helen DeWitt, Percival Everett, and Atticus Lish than Frank is, to name only Americans. Or J. M. Coetzee, Sheila Heti, Gerald Murnane, and Kazuo Ishiguro, to betray our country. I don’t think any of these writers could be said to be practitioners of judicious realism in the 19th-century mode. Then again, maybe they’re all 18th-century revenants—latter-day acolytes of Fielding and Sterne—and I’m fooling myself that they’ve done anything new.
The literary critic Hugh Kenner might argue that Frank’s subjects all come from the age of the typewriter and that something has gone haywire since we all plugged in. John Barth (another 18th-century guy?) might say that literature has always been cyclical, and if we’re living through a phase of retrenchment, that just means another turn is around the corner. Though Frank prizes novels of uncertainty, one thing is certain: the death of the novel was declared repeatedly throughout the 20th century, and Stranger than Fiction demonstrates that every such declaration was premature.
Christian Lorentzen is a Brooklyn-based writer
