The way to show that everything is connected is of course to make everything about everything.
Edwin Frank’s Stranger Than Fiction must have been a very difficult book to write. As the author explains in his introduction, it took over a decade for the idea—“the story of an exploding form in an exploding world”—to be realized and printed. That form is the novel and that world is the previous century. The author and the publishers must have put much tortured thinking into the selection of the around thirty novels which he treats at length: these are, he says, those novels that “have made it a point to puzzle over what they, the century and the novel, were doing together and how, in effect, they were to get along.” This might sound a bit vague, but one can be confident that there will be no P.G. Wodehouse or Patricia Highsmith, nothing that we read just for the laughs or thrills. The twentieth century, as the story will go, was one of “upheavals” and “delirium” that put much “stress” on the newish and still plastic art form, changing its shapes. There are definite personalities in these pages, like truculent H.G. Wells or glamorous Colette, but it is that shapeshifter, the novel, whom we follow through an “old-fashioned picaresque, full of scrapes and capers, scares and narrow escapes.” The author of this quasi-novelistic piece of literary criticism, history, and biography is Edwin Frank, best known as the editorial director of New York Review Books and founder of its Classics series, who has also taught at the Columbia University Writing Program, and published Snake Train: Poems 1984-2013. He has done an impressive job with Stranger than Fiction, balancing the canonical with the personal, finding minor links between his subjects, and reading each of them with imagination.
In a slightly cute opening move, Frank uses his prologue to present the narrator of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground as a bedraggled prophet and forerunner of the twentieth century narrator. That novel’s decade, the 1860s, saw the establishment of the Raj, the American Civil War, the Meiji Restoration, etc., and as Frank sheepishly points out, was a century before his own birth, indicating the “provisional and essentially personal character of any timeline.” According to Frank, turmoil gave the sensitive-souled Dostoevsky, whose dissident past is generously detailed here, a preview of the twentieth century’s cascading crises, prompting him to write Notes from Underground, this “howl of dismay,” this “essay in paradox” in its “radically unreliable” voice. That voice apparently echoes through the twentieth century, in the novels Frank has chosen, and beyond them. Frank proceeds chronologically through household names (H.G. Wells, Kafka, Kipling, Hemingway, Nabokov, Perec), names that will ring a bell (Italo Svevo, Jean Rhys), and some new to most readers (Hans Eirch Nossack, Alejo Carpentier). Each is given a potted biography. If there is a trope most often at play in Frank’s story of art vis-à-vis the artist, it is something like the wound and the bow, which is Edmund Wilson’s analogy from ancient myth in which private suffering is shown to be a spur and guide to artistic achievement. Frank addresses, for instance, Well’s shame over his family’s shabby lodgings which he could leave yet never really escape, or Hemingway’s literal wound from World War I, or the destruction of Anna Banti’s Florentine home by the Nazis. But, in keeping with his theme, these are class matters and the massive movements of history, not just personal tragedies. Though acknowledging literary exchange between his subjects, as from Kim to Ulysses, Frank does not tell us all that much about what these writers were reading, focused as he is on the histories they endured.
When dealing directly with the novels, Frank is diligent, perhaps too diligent, with his plot summaries. If these are sometimes drudgerous, the slower pace allows Frank to show how, for instance, the symbolic in D.H. Lawrence is also the merely incidental; or how allegorical correspondences in Kafka’s Amerika keep coming apart. When he decelerates enough to look closely at the sentences, Frank is an alert reader, most especially of D.H. Lawrence, the only novelist with two entries (Sons and Lovers and The Rainbow). Earlyish in the book, he discusses Gertrude Stein’s “liberation of the sentence” from nineteenth century conventions, and the franchise this gave to American writers like Hemingway, Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, and so on. But many of the subjects of Stranger Than Fiction are in translation, of course. Though Frank mentions the importance of the particular translation in which Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude found most of its readers (by Gregory Rabassa), he ends that chapter praising the novel’s “musicality,” without making it clear if this is a quality of the original or not, and the discussion of Elsa Morante’s History quotes single words and short phrases which he calls its “verbal ticks” and “pet phrases” as if the novel was written in English. Usually, when he faces a language gap, Frank stays away from the smallest scale, with the result that Joyce, Woolf, Hemingway, and the other English language writers are given a kind of special attention to their verbal surfaces, in addition to the usual talk of social change and the orchestration of themes.
The main stuff of the book is sometimes compromised by its ambition and the weighing of prerogatives. Frank writes that the nineteenth century novel tried to maintain “the dynamic balance between self and society,” a workable idea, but later he pictures it as a frowsty Victorian parlor where many important things (“domestic misery, manual labor, sex”) are not discussed, so that he can trumpet his authors as revolutionaries who depicted life more fully and honestly. Domestic misery and manual labor were certainly presentable subjects, and sex was not so much a forbidden subject as one necessarily treated differently. Even among the British, supposedly so prudish, Daniel Deronda or Tess of the d’Urbervilles might be worth a closer look. But while Frank, aware of the adventures of the novel in the eighteenth century, sees Swift in Wells and Sterne in Machado de Assis, he is committed to his image of the twentieth century novel shaking off the nineteenth century like a heavy mantle, leading him to miss some of their continuities. The novel not only relies on too simplified an idea of the nineteenth century but also takes too free roam within the twentieth century, across space and genre. The selection of novels has been criticized by other reviewers for phallo– and eurocentrism, but the geographical reach, at least, is also already strained. Decades of yoga could not prepare anyone for what Frank is attempting. He is ever in search of the connections that might make his disparate materials cohere. These are sometimes anecdotal—Robert Musil reports in a notebook that he is reading Svevo—but in other cases Frank must become nebulous in order to allow one novel to shade into another. The way to show that everything is connected is of course to make everything about everything. So Mrs. Dalloway is a “microcosm of the larger macrocosm that is London and the world at large,” and this is the same world that conveniently contains all the other novels. Mrs. Dalloway, along with the final volume of In Search of Lost Time and Hemingway’s collection In Our Time, was recording the shocks of the Great War, says Frank. Later, after the even greater war, he finds that all the important twentieth century novels are asking the question: “How to go on after all this has gone on?” A song of fatigue and worry is made to sound through all of them. Ralph Ellison’s idea of invisibility is an “impossibility” in an “impossible world” where “only impossibility offers a new beginning,” but there are perhaps some steps missing on the way to this mysticism. Morante’s History asserts the “primal innocence of storytelling” which is also the innocence of dreams, and dreams have no history. Sometimes Frank’s musing, chin-stroking tendency threatens to take over the book. The epilogue, though, after some windy talk about twenty-first -century turmoil, shows how W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz responds with its chorus of “preternaturally level” voices and its documentary dryness. Some new tones, evened out and chastened, are achieved.
Frank has conceded that his notion of the twentieth century novel might be a “useful fiction”: he would have us read some of Stranger Than Fiction’s flaws as novelistic flaws, which is to say as issues of proportion and believability, rather than accuracy. In a late passage, that notional twentieth century novel, which has been “devoted above all to affirming and preserving an idea of the heroic,” becomes the promised picaro, gallivanting about the globe in a “secular frenzy.” The brooding passages from V.S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival that follow do not jibe with this. The character Frank has written, Mr. Twentieth C. Novel, may not always fit into his surroundings. He may not always typify aspects of the world we find him in. Stranger Than Fiction, if you squint a little, can sit somewhere between nonfiction and fiction, between survey and novel, which makes it some kind of “book.” Indeterminacy may be helpful to Frank: as a “book,” Stranger Than Fiction is unburdened, so that qualities which would in either genre would have been requirements are now happy strengths. It is both entertaining and informative. It has drama and argumentation. If this liberal, cosmopolitan view is taken, one may be more able to accept the other note, the one you really don’t want to hear in either a literary or educational work. Frank wants us to read these novels and he is not worried about being subtle. Kipling, he writes, “set a standard for twentieth century prose,” and Kim “is about finding yourself, and it is a guidebook to getting lost.” This is not criticism; this is ad copy. In a book of enthusiasms, maybe it works: Frank is just helpfully telling you where to direct your hours and your dollars. Kim, his playfellows in these pages, and Stranger Than Fiction itself are probably all worth the investment.
The enthusiasm spills over into an appendix which lists another several dozen novels, starting with Wuthering Heights (1847) which is perhaps offered as another proto-twentieth century “howl of dismay.” Taking Frank’s suggestion, the constant reader might follow another lineage and write another version of Stranger Than Fiction, one whose main character had a different experience and thus different things to say. This next writer should be advised to remember that somewhat more of the frenzied experiment Frank associates with the twentieth century can be found in the century of Brontë and Dostoevsky: all through Moby Dick, for instance, or Anna Karenina’s carriage ride, near the end, verging on stream of consciousness, or the very strange, inconsistent things that are happening in the narration of Vanity Fair. At some point, if one finds too many features of the nineteenth century novel before their time, it will be difficult to maintain that they are products of twentieth century historical pressures, and one might turn more often from the view of the street through the writers’ windows to their bookshelves. As in the above sketch, every writer begins as a reader. History may be a nightmare from which you are trying to awake, but there are dreams within dreams.
Kazuo Robinson has written book reviews for The New Criterion, Cleveland Review of Books, and The Oxonian Review, and his Substack On Fiction is at kazuorobinson.substack.com. He lives in New York.
Thumbnail photo: Boston Public Library, Print Department