Fiction responding to fact

‘The novel has always liked the young.
The young, after all, have so many places to go …’

Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of  the Twentieth-Century Novel

EDWIN FRANK

(FERN PRESS, 480 PP, £25)

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When it comes to literary criticism, the term Modernist can easily confuse. It has been applied to countless writers, from Proust to Hemingway, Kafka to Woolf. But it’s not always clear what unites these authors, beyond their rejections of the conventions of the nineteenth-century novel. As Edwin Frank argues in Stranger Than Fiction, the term “is hopelessly overused”. Instead, he proposes a new cat­egory: the “twentieth-century novel”. This phrase captures the turbulent history unfolding in the background of these books better than any cultural movement or trend. 

Frank is an editor at The New York Review of Books and the founder of its celebrated Classics series. His collection of essays explores how “fiction responded to a century of fact”. For many of Frank’s subjects, even the most arduously researched of nineteenth-century novels seemed artificial; through innovations in style, subject matter and narrative technique, they attempted to create fiction that came closer to the truth. 

The account begins in 1864, with Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, “in part because the kind of political and social problems that Russia faced in the nineteenth century […] became general, even global, in the century to come”. That novella’s blend of bitter introversion and existential futility was a model for many twentieth-century narrators. At the same time, by discarding various staples of the nineteenth-century novel, Dostoevsky influenced authors as varied as Jean Rhys and Gabriel García Márquez.

From here, Frank ranges far and wide. As well as canonical texts like The Magic Mountain, Ulysses and Lolita, he includes lesser-known ­novels like Anna Banti’s Artemisia or Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian. There are surprising contrasts too: he includes both Rudyard Kipling’s Kim and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Gide’s The Immoralist and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. It’s impossible to discuss such novels without looking at race, power and politics, yet Frank avoids the kind of theory-heavy readings fashionable in many English departments. He also moves comfortably between micro and macro: from a single line or memorable scene to the wars and revolutions occurring as these novels were composed. 

Frank has a talent for one-liners: “Good writing surprises [readers] into suspending moral certainty.” “The towering uniqueness of [Mann’s, Proust’s and Joyce’s] books was taken as a bid for universality.” “The novel has always liked the young. The young, after all, have so many places to go; only one end awaits the old.” But, when writing about the most well-known works, he can struggle to find an original take: “Mrs Dalloway is a slim book of huge ambition.” Despite discussing some 30 books in detail, plenty of authors have to be skipped, notably Joseph Conrad. Frank explains that his essays cannot pretend to be comprehensive, but his own introduction makes clear that Conrad “invented the twentieth-­century novel”. Certainly, Conrad’s nested narrators and fractured narratives – navigating the confusion of globalised empires, exploitative trades and conspiratorial politics – anticipate the way many of the new century’s novels responded to historical events.

Nonetheless, as the essays draw to a close, with The Enigma of Arrival Frank achieves a conclusion of sorts. In Naipaul’s patient, meditative narrator, he finds the traces of almost half his cast, including Mann and Proust, Dostoevsky and Kafka. Here, he argues, “the secular frenzy of the twentieth-century novel was tantamount to a sacred horror at the bartering judiciousness of the nineteenth-century novel”. Again, it’s impossible to encompass so many books with a single argument, yet the sensitivity and ­sincerity with which Frank makes his case will send readers back to the originals with newfound respect.