Despite its relatively young age, the novel has planted itself as the highest form of literature in the twenty-first century. In Stranger than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth Century Novel, Edwin Frank argues that the tumult of the twentieth century placed a proportional amount of stress onto the novel as a form, transforming it into the novel we know today. Novels of the nineteenth century and before relied on traditional storytelling modalities, employing epic plots and archetypal characters to convey moralistic themes. Frank argues that the twentieth century cracked open the novel to be better able to reveal the truth at the heart of human experience.
With this book, Frank seeks to “puzzle over what they, the century and the novel, were doing together and how, in effect, they were to get along.” The violence of the early twentieth century combined with the rapid development of communications technology brought about a profound loss of innocence for the writers of the world. No longer were they interested in extolling moral virtue through larger than life allegory; the twentieth century novel preoccupies itself with far more quotidian concerns and takes a far more nuanced stand on them.
Frank provides evidence in the form of an historical and literary analysis of thirty novels across the twentieth century. These books and their authors make up a huge portion of what we now know as the literary canon. Frank’s detailed analysis lays bare the fact that art—especially fiction—cannot be understood outside of its historical-cultural context. Indeed, Frank argues, novels are nearly always a response to the times in which they were created. For each of the thirty novels included in his analysis, Frank wove together analysis of the novel with historical context and biographical information about their creators.
Divided into three roughly chronological parts, Frank’s analysis begins in the prologue with Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, published in 1864, which he argues lays the groundwork for the first true twentieth century novel. Part one focuses on the turn of the twentieth century through the first World War, covering twelve novels, including those by H.G. Wells, Franz Kafka, Gertrude Stein, and James Joyce. Part two examines eight novels spanning the interwar period through the end of World War II, including novels by Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, and Vasily Grossman. Part three accounts for the rest of the century and includes ten novelists including Chinua Achebe, Vladimir Nabokov, Ralph Ellison, and Gabriel García Márquez.
Much time and attention is spent grappling with the World Wars and their literary fallout, both in their deeply anxious prologues and devastated aftermaths. The first forty-five years of the twentieth century account for nearly seventy percent of the book. Frank briefly explores the impact of decolonization on the novel as well as the unrest of social justice movements in the second half of the century.
Frank’s analysis is robust and compelling, but what is not in the book lingers almost as much as what is. The final novel covered in the book was published in 1986, nearly fifteen years before the end of the century under examination. Frank addresses this in the opening paragraph of the epilogue this way: “By this time [1986] it was clear what the twentieth-century novel looked like and what it could do… About the same time—as providentially as in a novel—one of the conflicts that had done so much to shape the novel’s century also ended. In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell.” While the impulse to tie together the story of the twentieth century novel with all the trappings of a beautifully plotted story is understandable, history rarely cooperates. Frank’s analysis of the rest of the century saw significant developments to the form in every decade— were the 1990s bereft of such innovation or are those to be exclusively attributed to the twenty-first century?
Frank’s fear-mongering about the future of the novel as a form in the epilogue “At the same time, the information glut we now enjoy—or suffer from—has tended to reduce readers’ relish in novels and their capacity to absorb them… nothing so much as an increasing impatience and inability to submit to the complex requirements of serious reading…” rings somewhat false when considering that there is no analysis of the rise of popular fiction in the twentieth century. Genre fiction is similarly ignored.
The absence of many prolific and culturally significant writers—Agatha Christie, Ray Bradbury, Stephen King, to name a few, feel like glaring oversights. Intentional, it seems, though Frank leaves open the possibility that “perhaps something interesting will come of [genre fiction].” For all that the book omits, Stranger Than Fiction is a useful and compelling analysis of these thirty representative novels of the twentieth century. Those interested in that broader historical perspective will learn quite a lot.
NONFICTION
Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel
By Edwin Frank
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published November 19, 2024
