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.”
If Dostoevsky’s “unclassifiable” book – the structure of which resembles “nothing so much as a swept-up heap of broken glass” – set the pattern of that new relationship, Frank’s subsequent inquiries celebrate how the novel form became the place where changing ideas of fictional consciousness were tried out for size – from Gertrude Stein’s adventures with character as language in Three Lives to VS Naipaul’s restless examinations of post-colonial identity in The Enigma of Arrival.
Frank sometimes uses unlikely pairs of books to illustrate the ways very different writers responded to similar contemporary pressures – placing distinct confessionals such as Colette’s Claudine at School and Rudyard Kipling’s Kim alongside each other, for example, or finding the parallels between discrete experiments like Italo Svevo’s Confessions of Zeno and Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight. In other chapters, he focuses on individual novels: Mrs Dalloway – Virginia Woolf’s riposte to the “vulgarities” of Ulysses – or Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, the magic of whose realism, he suggests, in part lay in the fact that it was living proof of “the triumphant march of the 20th-century novel across the whole world”.
Frank follows the threads of that literary colonisation which advanced as empires themselves were retreating. His attention ranges far and wide, to Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, and Anna Banti’s Artemisia (there are only four American writers who make headline acts: Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Vladimir Nabokov and Ralph Ellison). As a critic, he is not seduced by labels – isms get short shrift. He champions the 20th-century novel as the ultimate hybrid “misbegotten” form, existing somewhere between memoir and history and myth and gives a thumbs up to poet Randall Jarrell’s catch-all description: “A novel is a prose narrative of a certain length with something wrong with it.”
If the writers share a fatal flaw, he suggests, it is a belief that the novel “matters immensely” and is undone by that fact. “To read them,” he writes, “is to catch them in the act of thinking about the novel in the midst of writing a novel… they write both as novelist and as critic writing over the novelist’s shoulder.” That schism, he argues, was rendered by the Great War and its effect on the European imagination, a fact articulated in the triumvirate of novels – Ulysses, In Search of Lost Time, and The Magic Mountain – that were conceived or begun before 1914 and entirely altered by what followed.
Frank’s great gift lies in vividly bringing to life the books themselves and the specific time and place of the individuals who created them. There can be no better proof of his engagement than that it had me, chapter by chapter, tracking down books that I hadn’t looked at for years – Hemingway’s In Our Time stories, for example, or HG Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau – and rereading them through his eyes, before rejoining him on his quest.
Stranger than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel by Edwin Frank is published by Fern Press (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
