Stranger Than Fiction

Cover image of STRANGER THAN FICTION: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel by Edwin Frank (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024)

This book began over the kitchen sink a long time ago. I was doing the dishes after dinner. A CD of Radiohead’s album Kid A was playing, which got me thinking about a recently published book, The Rest Is Noise, by the classical music critic (and Radiohead fan) Alex Ross. Ross’s book told the story of modern classical music in light of the twentieth century’s political, social, and technological upheavals; it took a rarefied Western art form out of the shelter of the concert hall into streets and factories, cabarets and concentration camps. Connecting the music’s challenging, refractory character to the delirium of modern times, Ross established classical music as a shaping presence in the cultural life of the century, which continued to enliven the work of, for example, Radiohead. Radiohead’s lead singer had cut his artistic chops in a church choir, singing music that dated back to the Middle Ages—in the band’s keening, staticky, doom-laden anthems you could make out the hosannas—while the record Kid A was, I remember the not very well-founded rumor to have been, a nod to Theodor Adorno, the twentieth-century German philosopher who had been an unyielding champion of modern music at its most abrasive, as well as an unrelenting scourge of popular music. This was another of Ross’s achievements: to connect the music of the century past with the music of today.

Writing about art in a way that illuminates the art itself as well as the life of art in the world is tricky. Ross had pulled it off. Could the same thing be done with the novel? The situation of the novel was different from the situation of so-called modern music. Far from slipping into notoriety and obscurity over the course of the last century, the novel had attained an even greater centrality to literary culture than it enjoyed in the past. It stood now as the literary form of the time, prestigious, popular, taken as both a mainstay of cultured conversation and of democratic culture. At the end of the twentieth century, the American pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty went so far as to anoint it the touchstone of contemporary ethical awareness. Without a doubt, the novel was central to a certain contemporary sensibility: where, for example, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, educated English speakers would have turned to the ancients, to Shakespeare and the poets, and to the Bible for edification, in Rorty’s account they now picked up Lolita. I grew up between the pages of novels, and the better part of my adult life has been spent there too. Reading novels and thinking about the novel, the kinds of forms it has taken at different times and places and the ways they might continue to speak to readers today, has also been one of the pleasures and puzzles of my job as the editor of the New York Review Books Classics series. (I have never had the least interest in writing a novel—but that is another story.) It was the novel by which we had come to take the measure of who we were and who our neighbors were and what, for better or worse, we were all capable of: good, evil, deception, irony, truth. In America after 9/11, the recent publication of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections—a big novel about the latter days of the last century—came to seem a timely reassurance that a rattled superpower could still see its reflection in the mirror.

How had the novel come to occupy this position? Could the story be told? Perhaps, but an obvious problem emerged. Novels are set apart by language in a way that music is not, while the very attention they lavish on local customs and mores, which can make them so telling to those in the know, can also render them entirely inscrutable to those who are not. We distinguish French literature from English and English from American, and only so much news slips across those borders. At the start of the twentieth century, Virginia Woolf wondered quite seriously how English readers could be expected to make head or tail of the translations of Russian literature that were beginning to appear at the time—and were, she was quite aware, already radically reshaping ideas of what the novel could be—when, she pointed out, Americans could hardly be counted on to grasp what was really going on, what was really at stake, in an English book. Her puzzlement, now, may seem exaggerated and even quaint, but the reasons for it haven’t gone away. The academic study of literature remains linked to university language departments, while our sentimental attachment to the novel draws on a sense of shared community. The novel, no matter how sophisticated, remains homey. No book is more densely located in language and place than Ulysses.

It would be hard then, I thought, to tell anything but the most summary story about the novel in the twentieth century, irrespective of languages and literatures. Perhaps it was impossible. Yet just as I was abandoning the idea, I glimpsed the outlines of this book. My thoughts turned again to the Russian novel, and the way it had made such an extraordinary impression on the literature of the world almost entirely in translation. “In translation” was the key, opening the way into the story of the novel, which was, as I suddenly saw it, a story of translation in the largest sense, not only from language to language and place to place but more broadly as the translation of lived reality into written form, something the expansive and adaptable form of the novel had from the start been uniquely open to, which the last century had provided the perfect—what?—petri dish in which it could further develop. On one hand, the twentieth century had been a century of staggering transformation—world war, revolution, women voting, empires falling, cities sprawling, expanded life spans and lives cut short, mass media, genocide, the threat of nuclear extinction, civil and human rights, and so on—a century to boggle the mind, which demanded and stretched and beggared description. On the other hand we had the novel, emerging from the nineteenth century as a robust presence with a tenacious worldly curiosity and a certain complacent self-regard, a form that was both ready to shake things up and asking to be shook up. Hadn’t the two, as the phrase goes, been made for each other?

The story of an exploding form in an exploding world? I thought it might make an interesting book.

Read more about Edwin Frank’s book in his recent interview with Mitchell Abidor, “Why the Twentieth-Century Novel Is Stranger Than Fiction.”