Stranger than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel review – 100 years of magical thinking | Literary criticism

edwin Frank pledges in his introduction to this book to try to do for the fiction of the last century what the critic Alex Ross’s remarkable book The rest It’s noise do for your music. He keeps his word. This is the most fascinating account of the development of the 20th century novel that you will read. Frank brings serious erudition to the task—his day job is the editorial director of New York Review Books, and for 25 years he edited the eclectic classic series that breathed new life into half-forgotten or out-of-print treasures. Although he has good critical judgment, Frank writes as an enthusiast at least as much as an academic, trusting his taste, always alive to the stories he tells and the arguments he makes.

His method is broadly chronological, offering the reader a “long” 20th century, beginning with the works of Dostoevsky Notes from the dungeon (1864) and ending with WG Sebald Austerlitz (2001). The selection of these two separate bookends to his examination of the 30 examples from the modern novel gives some insight into the emphasis of the project and the author’s interests. He is drawn to books that challenge the form itself in various ways, ones that self-consciously or otherwise disrupt the grander certainties of the great novels of the 19th century. “Writers of the 20th century have been waited on by history,” writes Frank. “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—whose structure resembles “nothing more than a swept-up pile of broken glass”—defines the pattern of this new relationship, Frank’s subsequent inquiries celebrate how the novel form has become the site where shifting ideas of the fictional consciousness was tried on for size—from the adventures of Gertrude Stein with character as language in the Three lives to the restless studies of V. S. Naipaul on Postcolonial Identity in The enigma of arrival.

skip past newsletter promotion

after the promotion of the newsletter

Frank sometimes uses uncanny book pairings to illustrate the ways in which many different writers have responded to similar contemporary pressures—placing different confessions like Colette’s Claudine at school and Rudyard Kipling Kim side by side, for example, or finding parallels between separate experiments like that of Italo Svevo The Confessions of Zeno and that of Jean Rhys Good morning, midnight. In other chapters he focuses on individual novels: Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf’s response to the “vulgarities” of Odysseus – or Gabriel García Márquez One Hundred Years of Solitudethe magic of whose realism, he says, lies partly in the fact that it is living proof of “the triumphal march of the 20th-century novel around the world.”

Frank follows the threads of this literary colonization, which advances as the empires themselves recede. His attention spanned as far and wide as that of Chinua Achebe things Wellall Apartand to Anna Banti Artemisia (there are only four American writers who make headlines: Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Vladimir Nabokov, and Ralph Ellison). As a critic, he is not seduced by labels – the isms diverge. He upholds the 20th-century novel as the ultimate hybrid “misbegotten” form, existing somewhere between memoir, history, and myth, and gives a thumbs-up to poet Randall Jarrell’s sweeping description: “A novel is a prose narrative of a definite length with something not along with him.

If the writers share a fatal flaw, he suggests, it is the belief that the novel “has enormous significance” and is rendered meaningless 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 as both a novelist and a critic, writing over the novelist’s shoulder.” This schism, he argues, was caused by the Great War and its effect on the European imagination, a fact articulated in the triumvirate of novels— Odysseus, In search of lost timeand The magic mountain – which were conceived or started before 1914. and entirely changed by what followed.

Frank’s great gift is that he vividly brings to life the books themselves and the specific time and place of the people who created them. There could be no better proof of his commitment than that he made me track down, chapter by chapter, books I hadn’t looked at in years – Hemingway’s c Our time stories, for example, or of H. D. Wales The island of Doctor Moreau – and reread them through his eyes before joining him on his quest.

• Stranger Than Fiction: The Life of the Twentieth-Century Novel by Edwin Frank is published by Fern Press (£25). In support of Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Shipping charges may apply