Stranger Than Fiction:
The Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel
By Edwin Frank
Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 480 pages, $33
If there is any cultural and intellectual institution today that has the sanctity of the old New Yorker, it’s the New York Review Books Classics series, conceived of and edited by Edwin Frank. NYRB Classics rescues out-of-print masterpieces, especially those in translation, that have been dropped by big commercial publishers who can’t appreciate them, and presents them in visually iconic new editions to bookish insiders. I’m center mass for NYRB Classics: I’ve never read one I didn’t love, and have long struggled to draw on books by any other publisher for my cooking-from-literature column for the Paris Review (a rough count shows that it’s about 1 in 7). For me, NYRB Classics are the ultimate pleasure-read, striking just the right balance of challenge to entertainment. Thus, the publication of Stranger Than Fiction: The Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel, a book written by the legendary Edwin Frank, is something of a tablets-of-Moses moment.
Frank writes in the book’s introduction that he has “never had the least interest in writing a novel”—an almost incredible claim. What he has set out to do instead is to create a hybrid form, neither literary criticism nor literary history but the story of the novel’s development in the 20th century, told through representative books. The obscure word “Lives” in the subtitle nods toward the fine calibration of this creation. The book is criticism, but it is also a lively series of vignettes on roughly 30 books, some well known, some not, which Frank believes speak to and reflect their moment.
From the outset, this is thrilling. Stranger Than Fiction is a survey course taught by your most magnetic professor—though, in a 21st-century upset, few professors today contribute to the culture the way Frank does. He begins with a much-needed explanation of what was “realist” about the great 19th-century realist novels, the marker from which the 20th-century strategies departed. Realism isn’t just an observational style or way of describing human sensibility, he says, but an outlook of valuing balance and pragmatism. In the 19th century, there was “a conventional view … of what the novel should do quite exactly.” Writers understood that there were “claims that the world, or society makes on us and claims made by the self” and a common-sense integration of these two views would result in a proper and realistic relation to reality. “Description or imitation” is the realist novel’s central power, “but its vaunted realism doesn’t stem from its many realistic effects, persuasive and pleasurable though they are, so much as it does from the judgement it displays in assembling such features of the common human predicament for our consideration.” The realist-novel formula was character and situation conducted under trustworthy narrative oversight.
This made sense, Frank argues, for the grounded and coherent societies of the 19th century, which were working on becoming democracies and focusing on representation and the social fabric. But beginning with the great social changes of the 1860s, the 19th-century strategies of “keeping things under control,” “finding a place for all [the] characters,” and “obtaining the reader’s vote of confidence” stopped feeling so realistic. Frank begins the history of the 20th-century novel in 1864, with Dostoevsky’s Notes From the Underground, a book he views as an exercise in ambush and imprisonment in subjectivity for protagonist and reader alike. As Dostoevksy represented it, to be human is to be trapped in the dirty hole of the self, and no reliable narrative consciousness is controlling anything. This is the beginning of the novel in the 20th century, which was to become “an exploding form in an exploding world” that would be “shaped and reshaped … in response to a world of ongoing violent change.”
The new shaping starts with Notes From the Underground and also, Frank suggests, in a brilliantly off-key pairing, with H.G. Wells and André Gide—the creators of science fiction and autofiction, respectively. Notes is Dostoevsky’s least plot-driven work; Wells is now considered a “lightweight,” as Frank says, and Gide has “held up badly.” If Dostoevksy is the beginning of the self-absorbed and unreliable narrative consciousness, Wells and Gide are the beginning of a split between popular and intellectual fiction, though Frank doesn’t quite put it so baldly. Wells wrote powerful but crude books for the masses, and he needed the money; Gide was an aristocrat who disdained commerce and, Frank says, wrote for educated people who considered themselves “unlikely and unusual and self-aware … the self-selected audience of the select” (a great observation on the autofiction crowd).
From this chapter on, Stranger Than Fiction drops the Wells branch of popular fiction and focuses on the branch that Gide represents, where “the self steps to center stage and pursues its own shadow.” It’s also possibly not incidental that Gide was gay and a rapt pursuer of the sex trade with young boys. “Gide was interested in himself, endlessly interested, and that self was hardly the sort of thing whose claims, sexual or otherwise, could be balanced with those of society,” Frank explains. Gide’s great work, published in 1902, was titled The Immoralist, and the next one The Counterfeiters. Both sought not to judge but to reflect—an activity he felt required its own kind of bravery and discipline. He coined the term mise en abyme to represent the infinite regression of the self reflecting on the self, which, Frank writes, “has entered the philosophical lexicon as a byword for metafictional elaboration.” Abyme, in French, means abyss.
“Frank elegantly disposes of the term modernism in his introduction.”
Frank elegantly disposes of the term modernism in his introduction—the categorizations don’t interest him. And if “postmodernism” is uttered even a single time, I missed it. He is out to parse what each book does in its reflection on the form, and how it does it a little differently than any other, and how the author’s choices can be situated in their historical moment. This provides a wonderful service, especially when it comes to authors like Wells and Gide, and many others more obscure, who matter but whom the reader may have not encountered.
But it has patchwork results; I found it sometimes illuminating, sometimes deadening, depending on how much I already knew about the authors, or how tired I was of their particular innovation. That Colette and Rudyard Kipling expanded the definition of who was allowed to speak—the onset of identity fiction—is surely true, but it’s the least interesting thing about them. In some cases, particularly in the book’s early chapters, a quotation Frank mentions from Robert Musil seemed to apply: “A thing wholly comprehended instantly loses its bulk and melts down into a concept.” Frank also has a tendency toward dad jokes—Wells “sees no difference between the best people and the beast people”; America, in Kafka’s Amerika, is “all business and busyness”—that’s lovable, but not equal to the glories of world literature.
In the second half, the argument loosens up beneficially, starting with a section on Musil that does good service in opening up an intimidating body of work. Next up are writers Frank considers to be “exceptions”—Italo Svevo, Jean Rhys, and D.H. Lawrence. All three were more concerned with what they were trying to communicate than with the form of the novel. Frank’s literary reckoning with World War II is gripping, beginning with a work I hadn’t heard of, Hans Erich Cossack’s The End, and ending with Nabokov, who, Frank says, introduced “pop glamor” to the field of literature and also was the first to “blur the difference between authorial art and its main character’s arts and the reader’s involvement and pleasure.” Insights like these are why we want to be perched on the great man’s armchair.
Frank’s diagnostics of what the novel has been doing and why are so astute that I wished he’d write a sequel. In the 21st century, it seems quite possible that the novel is no longer the “the literary form of the time … prestigious, popular, taken as both a mainstay of cultured conversation and of democratic culture,” as it once was. And it also seems possible that the two things were symbiotic, and we need this capacious and complex and irreducible form to foster both culture and democracy. If we need the novel, what are the social forces that might provide some indication of a new and revitalizing shape for it? Frank suggests it might be over—as with classical music, he implies, there has been no major development in fiction in the past 30 years. I think David Foster Wallace tried, and Sally Rooney has succeeded. And both, in their own way, turned away from the heart-as-an-abyss, and back toward the reader and society. Rooney especially, has collapsed the Wells/Gide distinction between popular and literary fiction. A good place to start.