A World Literature Begins to Take Shape

Mitchell Abidor reviews Edwin Frank’s “Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel.”

By Mitchell AbidorNovember 26, 2024

• Literary Criticism

THOUGH STRANGER THAN FICTION (2024) is Edwin Frank’s first book on the novel, any serious reader is already familiar with the author’s work. It was Frank, the editorial director of the invaluable NYRB Classics series (in which—full disclosure—I have published two translations), who rescued John Williams’s 1965 novel Stoner from obscurity, who has made much of Victor Serge’s work available to English-language readers, and who reissued Vasily Grossman’s massive masterpiece Life and Fate (1980). Frank’s sensibility and judgment are unequaled, and Stranger Than Fiction, which traces the origins and path of the novel in the 20th century, is a book of inestimable value.

The 20th-century novel, Frank convincingly asserts, begins its life in the middle of the 19th century. This, then, is a history of literature’s long 20th century, a counterpart to Giovanni Arrighi’s history of capitalism, which situated the beginning of the 20th century in 1870. Frank goes back slightly farther, to 1864 and Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground. The solitary creature in his hole, at odds with society, who would appear frequently in fiction over the following century—characters such as Meursault in The Stranger (1942) and Rilke’s Malte Laurids Brigge, among many others—all sprout from the Underground Man.

But Frank sees far more in Notes from Underground than the source of the alienated loner. Dostoevsky’s structure, with the protagonist’s thoughts and ideas dominating the first half of the book and his self-abasing recounting of a gathering with workmates the second, signals the beginning of the fracturing of narrative that will feature so prominently in the century that follows. For Frank, all of this flows from the “collapse of the old balanced order” that dominated literature until then. Unlike writers of the 19th century, those of the 20th “exist in a world where the dynamic balance between self and society that the nineteenth-century novel sought to maintain can no longer be maintained, even as a fiction.” It is precisely the acceptance of this loss of balance that will be the motive force of the great 20th-century writers.

Frank casts a wide net in demonstrating the path of the novel, taking in a disparate group—from familiar names like Proust, Joyce, Mann, Hemingway, and Woolf to less celebrated writers who have, even so, played a role in the development of the form, such as Italo Svevo and Hans Erich Nossack. Frank makes his case for the writers he chooses (and so clearly loves) elegantly and convincingly, and they are shown to be deeply connected at various levels—the total of these connections adding up to the 20th-century novel. Moreover, Frank doesn’t restrict himself to European and North American writers, seeing in quirky works like Brazilian author Machado de Assis’s Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (1881) and Japanese novelist Natsume Sōseki’s laconic Kokoro (1914) the ways “the European novel is consciously refashioned in light of non-European realities, and something like a world literature begins to take shape.”

The book’s opening chapters, on H. G. Wells and André Gide, set the tone for the rest of the volume. Frank makes a compelling and surprising case for the once-popular Wells—an enormously prolific talent in his day, perhaps too much so, and yet he produced works of fiction that deserve to be more widely read than they now are. Wells’s early “scientific romances” such as The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), and The War of the Worlds (1898) are not merely thrilling reads but magnificent works of social criticism. For Frank, though, Wells represents far more. He was, to be sure, an “unabashedly commercial writer at the start of an era that would be defined by ever-growing commercialism,” yet he was also both “supremely accessible” and “supremely ingenious.” With his great early masterpieces, Wells “invented a new kind of fiction and a new audience for fiction,” his speculative works functioning as incisive critiques of the real world. In the process, Wells “helped (with the assistance of Sherlock Holmes) to establish genre fiction, or genre in fiction, on a new footing.”

Wells criticized Henry James for what, in Frank’s words, he correctly viewed as “evasions of social (and cosmic!) realities”—realities Wells boldly embraced as he created an estimable body of work. Frank allows us to see more deeply into the significance of Wells as a serious novelist with “a vision of a looming, unknowable, infinite, shelterless outside. We are locked within this inhuman space, and no matter how hard we try, and we must try, it will not in the end be given to us to understand it.” Such a description would seem to prefigure the works of Camus or Sartre; indeed, it is almost a definition of existentialism in literature. Thus, in Frank’s critical treatment, novels that may seem to be mere divertissements are shown to carry genuine weight and gravitas.

Frank places Gide, as effete a character as ever graced the French literary scene, in a direct line with Wells the middle-class Englishman, even though no two writers could seem more different. With his 1902 novel The Immoralist, Gide established a template in which the main character pursues his own interests and desires, heedless of those around him. He is the writer of the individual, of the man who pursues his own goals with egoistic aplomb. The protagonist of The Immoralist comes to terms with his homosexuality and abandons his wife to her fate; similarly, in La Symphonie pastorale (1919), the male lead’s love for a blind girl leads to ruination for everyone involved. Especially in his early novels, society figures hardly at all.

But Gide did make forays into social activism, both in his condemnation of French colonialism in Africa—in his 1927 book Travels in the Congo—and in his attempt to come to grips with the reality of communism in Return from the USSR (1936). Formally, Wells and Gide could not be more distant from each other, with Gide’s carefully hewn phrases the veritable antithesis of Wells’s utilitarian style. And yet, as Frank says, despite all that separates them, “on second thought they bear a curious resemblance to each other”: both men were notorious for their sexual appetites (though Gide was gay and Wells straight), and for both, sex was “a cause.” Relative contemporaries, they “are in a sense monuments to the moment when Victorian conventions are being challenged but a Victorian sense of moral purpose still motivates the challenge.” Wells far more than Gide was involved in social causes, but both were important public figures; and “for all their questioning of moralism, [they] are very much old-fashioned moralists, determined to reshape the attitudes of their contemporaries for, as they see it, the better.”

Frank is an excellent guide to the architecture of massive novels like Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (1913–27) or Robert Musil’s underread The Man Without Qualities (1930–43), but his focus encompasses more than just the overall effect of such works. A poet himself, Frank is concerned with the smallest component parts: a novel’s paragraphs and, even more, its sentences. He presents the unlikely pairing of Kafka’s Amerika (1927) and Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives (1909), both of which “refashion the paragraph and the sentence into suggestive new instruments of discovery.” Indeed, he goes further with Kafka, pointing out that his sentences “are all about movement, and it is at the level of the sentence, or even the clause, where he works his real magic.” For Frank, it is not so much plot elements that define the Kafkaesque; it is rather “his sentences, which capture the sense of time—mental, emotional, historical—on the fly and set his work apart, making it, you could say, a genre of one.”

The catholicity of Frank’s taste and the clarity of his insights emerge as he proceeds to connect Kafka with a writer as unlike him as imaginable—Rudyard Kipling. Kipling, too, excels at the granular level, his “taut sentences […] set[ting] a standard for twentieth-century prose.” It’s in his chapter on Stein, though, that Frank makes his most direct case for the aesthetic significance of the sentence. Stein was, of course, the one who discovered that “putting the sentence at the center of writing, a sentence that can go on and on or be cut as short as can be, but that one way or another, as a kind of exploratory probe, takes precedence over the idea of the work as a whole.”

But it is books as a whole that earn Frank’s subjects a place in Stranger Than Fiction. Frank is not interested in merely cycling through the canon, though the masterworks are all here: Mrs. Dalloway (1925), Ulysses (1922), The Magic Mountain (1924), Sons and Lovers (1913). Yet we also encounter Colette and Chinua Achebe, examine Georges Perec’s Oulipian masterpiece Life: A User’s Manual (1978) and Alejo Carpentier’s magic realist novel The Lost Steps (1953). Frank makes a case for Alfred Kubin’s relatively little-known and extremely odd The Other Side (1908), which originated in the author’s attempt to write a story built around drawings for Gustav Meyrink’s The Golem (1915). Frank describes it as “a minor book” and “a narrative demolition derby” but still sees it as a fecund text: the works of Kafka, Ernst Jünger, even Gabriel García Márquez are descended from Kubin’s dreamlike novel.

In Stranger Than Fiction’s end is its beginning, the book concluding with W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz (2001). “You could call Austerlitz a twentieth-century novel,” Frank writes, since “it is after all about […] the calamities it brought and about the effort […] to bring those calamites to light. It might even be called a twentieth-century novel of record, the last.” But Frank then retracts this proposal. For all the elegance of Sebald’s prose, “the voices of Austerlitz […] are by contrast almost preternaturally level,” and the story returns us yet again “to the figure who has haunted this book from its beginning […] the Underground Man, still lost in the abstract and hallucinatory city.”

There are, of course, writers missing from Stranger Than Fiction that one can’t help but feel deserved a place. The most obvious is Louis-Ferdinand Céline, the anti-Proust who rejected that author’s high-flying language in favor of everyday French, dragging the novel into the gutter. His oeuvre is important on its own, but its influence has been universal. Also missing is John Dos Passos, whose blend of the actual and the fictional, along with the sheer movement of his writing, impressed and influenced novelists around the world.

Stranger Than Fiction is a rare thing: a volume of criticism that is a thrilling read. This is largely owed to Frank’s passion for his subject but also to his avoidance of academic jargon. Frank has taught literature, but he is most decidedly not an academic. His prose is clear, his opinions well- thought-out and engagingly explained. Stranger Than Fiction is a book that wants us to read: to read more and read better. It not only illuminates unexpected connections but also suggests that there are many, many other links out there still waiting to be discovered.