The modernist novel was a response to a tumultuous century, Edwin Frank argues in a new book.

Alive and Kicking

By Christian Lorentzen

Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel by Edwin Frank

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.