Edwin Frank vows in his introduction to this book to try to do for the fiction of the last century what the critic Alex Ross’s landmark book The Rest Is Noise did for its music. He is as good as his word. This is the most engaging imagining of the progress of the 20th-century novel you will read. Frank brings serious erudition to the task – in his day job he is editorial director of New York Review Books and has for 25 years edited its eclectic classics series which breathes new life into half-forgotten or out-of-print treasures. Though he has a fine critical judgment, Frank writes as an enthusiast at least as much as an academic, trusting his taste, always alive to the stories he is telling and the arguments he makes.
His method is broadly chronological, offering the reader a “long” 20th century, beginning with Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground (1864) and concluding with WG Sebald’s Austerlitz (2001). The choice of those two particular bookends to his study of 30-odd examples of the modern novel gives some idea of the emphasis of the project and the interests of the author. He is drawn to books that challenge the form itself in different ways, those that self-consciously or otherwise disrupt the more stately certainties of the great 19th-century novels. “The writers of the 20th century are ambushed by history,” Frank writes. “They exist in a world where the dynamic balance between self and society that the 19th-century novel sought to maintain can no longer be maintained, even as fiction.”
