Kicking an Open Door

Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel by Edwin Frank. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 480 pages. 2024

Did the novels of the twentieth century accomplish anything? Edwin Frank, who is known for his love of the genre, is convinced they did. In his stylish, selective survey Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel, he focuses on the genre’s formal innovations, which take readers’ minds off their somewhat vulgar appetite for suspenseful plot and relatable character and teach them to be satisfied, instead, with something like a diet of single sentences, exquisitely prepared. The genre’s masterworks urge us to set a slower pace, savoring what each novelist puts on the table and realizing, as we push back our chairs, how much more substantial the meal was than what we thought we wanted.

There is both instruction and pleasure to be had from Frank’s commentaries on modernist sentence-making. In German, as he notes, the run-on sentence doesn’t violate any rules, but Kafka takes the run-on and runs away with it, adding “slight nervous shifts of tone and implication, abrupt introductions of unforeseen elements that are then absorbed without comment, as if expected.” This procedure makes these sentences “an endless surprise, entertaining disconcerting, effortless, tortured, suddenly funny, and wonderfully sad.” Gertrude Stein can reject all but the simplest, dullest words and can drive the reader to distraction by repeating those dull words over and over, but that’s not what made her magical to writers like Hemingway. Putting the sentence at the center of writing, as Stein does, means that a sentence “can go on or be cut as short as can be, but that one way or another, as a kind of exploratory probe, [it] takes precedence over the work as a whole.” Playfully mimicking Stein, Frank himself goes on: “You start with the sentence and the sentence finds out where it is going and you go on from there.” It’s advice on how to live. Proust’s In Search of Lost Time “is notorious not only for its length as a whole but also for the length of its individual sentences,” and this is “because in it the individual sentence often functions as a kind of sample of the whole . . . going on until it seems at risk of losing its raison d’être, going on until the reader may despair of its going anywhere—as Proust’s narrator frequently despairs that his life is not going anywhere—until at last it does fall into place, does come to a point.”

Novels are written for people who, like Proust’s protagonist, worry that their lives may not be going anywhere. After all, there are so many ways of getting stuck in a thorny patch of anxious aimlessness. The reassuring message the novel tells you is that if, in spite of it all, I can nevertheless come to a point, then maybe so can you. To some, this view of the novel will seem too superficial, too therapeutic. While Frank doesn’t appear to be reaching for the profitable self-help genre of How Proust Can Change Your Life, what if he were? Take the this-can-change-your-life motivation away and the book business would be in more parlous shape than it already is.

Frank’s day job is to sell books, and perhaps for that reason, his mode is cheerily appreciative. Unlike other observers, he ignores apocalyptic scenarios about shrinking attention spans and the end of the world of reading. No, the novel is not dying. On the contrary, it is “a thriving business.” “Novels are being written and published not only throughout the Western world but wherever the increasing literacy and disposable income that the form requires to flourish are to be found.”

It may be that New York Review Books, the imprint Frank founded and of which he remains the editorial director, is doing better than other small independent presses, many of which are famously struggling to stay afloat. In any case, for all his appreciation of the high modernists, Frank is also an admirer of the century’s surprisingly plentiful bestsellers. Stranger Than Fiction starts with Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, perhaps the most uncomfortable piece of nineteenth-century fiction ever canonized and a major inspiration for the highest of the high-brow works of the twentieth. But Frank jumps from Dostoevsky’s Underground Man to the “unabashedly commercial” H.G. Wells, who was world famous both for his science fiction (novels like The Time Machine, War of the Worlds, and The Island of Doctor Moreau) and as a plain-speaking, well-remunerated advisor to the public on the issues of the day. Kafka is followed by Kipling and Colette, both of whom turned themselves into sustained and highly profitable enterprises. Wells, Kipling, and Colette were not, are not, and are not going to be known for their aesthetic accomplishments at the level of the sentence. But all three, Frank argues, expressed something significant about the culture of their time. The beautiful sentence-makers may have had less cultural impact, but they, too, captured a collective experience.

Exquisite sentences are one thing; to present the novel as representing a collective experience raises different questions. Frank is a skillful storyteller, weaving together expository accounts of the novels with tangy anecdotes from the authors’ biographies. His subtitle refers to a multiplicity of “lives,” lived by the authors as well as by their imagined characters, and maybe he doesn’t need a single story. But if the twentieth century did go through a shared cultural experience and if the novel articulated that experience, as he suggests, it seems fair to ask what story he’s telling. Whose collective experience is he talking about? Laid end to end, what do his own elegantly turned sentences add up to?

The book does not offer a single answer, and it might be foolhardy for anyone else to try. Still, one possible answer that gets a lot of play with Frank is the horrors of war. War was certainly a major feature of the century’s cultural experience, as everyone has reason to know, and it certainly establishes the author’s gravitas. But as a theme, its horrors feel a bit disappointing. Is war hell? Yes, it is. Some credit is due Frank for digging up textual evidence that great modernists like Woolf, Joyce, and Proust (the heart of the book) were thinking about World War I when they were seemingly writing about other things, like the terra incognita of deep subjectivity. (In Proust, for example, “The deadlocked and destructive nature of the relationship between the two lovers resembles nothing so much as the war in the trenches that had yet to take place at the time the story is set, but that was going on and going nowhere as Proust wrote it.”) But other than preferring peace, what exactly did these writers think about it? (In Mann, things are more troubling: no great writer has published anything more barbaric than Mann’s enthusiastic tribute to German victory and the cleansing bloodshed of the battlefield in Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, written over the course of World War I. Frank’s point about him is characteristically conciliatory: in spite of this rant, he says, Mann did not have a tantrum when Germany was defeated.) Were Joyce, Woolf, and Proust thinking anything new and noteworthy on the topic of war, the horrors of? If war is politics by other means but you’re not very interested in politics, as Frank is not, then really, how much is there to say?

Another answer to the collective experience question, and one for which Frank shows some enthusiasm, is that the novel demonstrates the achievement of a certain self-awareness—in philosophical terms (not Frank’s), that the genre displays the necessary loss of what Hegel called self-certainty. At the end of D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, Frank tells us, “What he [the protagonist, Paul] arrives at is the full uncertainty of his own self.” War is bad, self-awareness and the ensuing self-uncertainty are good. When the words are repeated, in the apparent expectation that the reader will feel stunned and enlightened, Frank is kicking an open door.

Similarly, Frank informs us, apropos of Gide, that “good writing surprises us into suspending moral certainty.” At this late date, is the need to suspend moral certainty really a surprise? Was it surprising even a century ago? So informed, I find myself wondering whether, in Gide or elsewhere, the general reader really has an appetite for this degree of banality. Who can get through a day without being reminded by multiple sources that moral uncertainty is the sea in which we swim? Or, for that matter, that if you can, you might want to grab onto something solid? If I were to object that sometimes moral certainty isn’t such a bad thing, however, and good writing is interested in picking out what such occasions are, or that the endless pursuit of levels of self-awareness can be, indeed has often proved itself to be, evasive, self-indulgent, and self-destructive, as good writing might also suggest, Frank would no doubt agree. He’s generally agreeable, and he’s not too tied to being consistent. After all, the self is unknowable, a moral Frank finds again and again in his favorite novels, and who is he to pretend to know himself? This argument is mildly interesting, but it’s more interesting to consider that on this point Frank may be representative of a certain failure of nerve, a lazy if sophisticated complacency.

Frank’s amiable openness invites the reader to try their hand at tracing other pathways through the fiction of the twentieth century. One might for example start again where Frank does, with Dostoevsky, but this time with The Double. That route could lead to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, where the brutal colonialist Kurtz is a kind of double to Marlow, who is at least somewhat critical of colonialism, and from there to its Sudanese reversal in Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North (reissued, with the gratitude of many, by New York Review Books Classics). The Marlow figure of Season enters a secret room in the dark and thinks he is looking at a portrait of the Kurtz figure, his double, a fellow Sudanese who has traveled into the heart of European darkness and committed unspeakable acts against white women. Then he realizes he is looking at himself in a mirror: “standing face to face with myself,” acknowledging that, in spite of yourself, you are carrying the baggage of colonialism and you don’t know how to put it down—it’s another, more worldly kind of self-awareness—worldly in the sense of being aware of one’s place in the world outside one’s country.

For Frank, Notes from Underground can stand for “the voice of the twentieth century novel” because that voice is “supremely equivocal” and “radically unreliable.” It is, however, a single voice. A survey of the twentieth-century novel might also have been organized around Mikhail Bakhtin’s Dostoevsky, the novelist of dialogue, of polyphony, or many voices. Against his own political inclinations, which were reactionary, Bakhtin’s Dostoevsky liberated ideological exchange from authorial overview and invented the feeling of an as-yet-unrealized democracy. Behind criticism’s heavy polysyllabic terms, like polyphony and heteroglossia, lies an accessible achievement that is both literary and political: Dostoevsky not only allowed for voices to respond to other voices, but imagined a society in which voices had to respond to other voices, no matter what it cost them or how rude and inappropriate the other voices were. This could be called formal democracy, taking “formal” here in a literary sense. Another way in which the novel reflects and instructs the cultural experience of the twentieth century, it is democracy experienced in and as literary form, as something that works more strongly on the pulse than what democracy’s enfeebled parliamentary version and the electoral college have heretofore permitted.

Other than a brief epilogue, Frank’s book ends with Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival, published in 1987. Lopped off, along with the 1990s, is Naipaul’s earlier career as a hitman for Western attacks on the newly independent former colonies. Frank says nothing about Naipaul’s embrace of the West’s self-certainty as a bastion of civilization, the (shifting) standard by which the former colonies could be held to account. By virtue of his sadness, as he watches “the world he knew come to nothing,” Naipaul gets credit from Frank for being critical and self-aware. Frank himself doesn’t seem aware that, as in Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (he notes that Waugh was one of Naipaul’s models), what Naipaul is now criticizing is the crass commercialism of contemporary British society; in other words, that he’s speaking in the name of the declining British aristocracy. When old money despises new money, he’s ready to despise along with it. Making nice with Naipaul seems to be in fashion these days, but not everyone will see Naipaul’s aristocrato-imperial nostalgia as a bold move toward self-awareness.

The problem with stopping in 1987 is not just one missing decade, though readers will regret the omission of writers like Caryl Phillips, Jeanette Winterson, James Kelman, Ben Okri, Ian McEwan, Irvine Welsh, Alasdair Gray, Martin Amis, Margaret Atwood, and Edward P. Jones, among others. (Plenty of better-grounded anti-commercialism there.) It would have deepened Frank’s commitment to reading the century through Dostoevsky if he had paused to follow Dostoevsky’s influence through that decade. Dostoevsky’s signature dialogism comes to a triumphant if provisional conclusion in W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants (1992), where characters efface themselves helplessly before the voices of victims of the Holocaust; and in Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives (1998), where the central narratives slide, unmarked, into the narratives of minor lives that would otherwise seem doomed to oblivion. These are two masterpieces in which rich and poor, privileged and underprivileged, people who would rarely if ever meet each other socially, suddenly find themselves in awkward confrontation, unable to maintain the distinctness of their outlines or to surrender desire for recognition. In these novels, the reader can contemplate the century’s failure to achieve perfect self-awareness, how its story remains emphatically unfinished.

As Frank knows—and it underscores his case for the grandeur of the genre—there is no end to the naming of novels that richly deserved his and his readers’ attention. He himself calls his choices “casual,” and he adds an appendix of seventy-five novelists he would have liked to discuss. The list includes Céline and Pynchon, both of whom might have stretched Frank’s formal and political ambitions. His decision to discuss only one novel that was not written in a major European language, Natsume Soseki’s Kokoro, is not prima facie outrageous or a deal-breaker; geographical equity in representation would hardly have been feasible. But a foray or two outside that Eurocentric border wall would probably have juiced up Frank’s narrative. Without serious attention to paradigmatic writers like Eileen Chang (briefly touched on) or Ghassan Kanafani, any account of Frank’s own themes, the century’s collective experience of mass violence and its collective achievement of self-awareness, is bound to seem truncated, provincial, a bit bland.

By the end of Stranger Than Fiction, the reader may feel that the experience has been somewhat less strange than they may have hoped and the attention to the fiction somewhat less probing or challenging. Frank’s house style is genial, pleasantly gossipy, and methodologically deferential. Whenever some possibility of negative criticism looms on the horizon and can’t actually be ignored, as with Kipling’s enthusiastic support for British imperialism, Frank finds a way of implying that the criticism is trivial and in any case the novelist in question is smarter and cooler, because she or he is (also) doing something else, something the naysayer isn’t seeing. The novel under consideration always seems craftier and wiser than the naive, plodding, always offended critic, especially a critic given to moral and political judgments. The rhetoric works. Who wants to quarrel with praise for superior wisdom? Novels often seem wiser than their readers. But this can’t always be true, can it? To an academic, at least, the repetition of this appreciative, even reverential posture is a little off-putting.

We academics also love literature, but not to the point of getting down on our knees. Yes, we do sometimes justify our labors by proudly discovering some ideological flaw in the books we’re discussing. On the other hand, literary culture in the non-academic sphere sometimes seems to be trying for nothing more than to make the would-be consumer happy to consume the product. Advice to “positive” critics: you don’t want to sound like your refined appreciation is just trying to get people to buy the damn books.