“Teenage Boy Reading” | Roy Zalesky / Smithsonian Museum / CC0
In the years that Edwin Frank has been at the head of New York Review Books Classics, he has revived forgotten or out of print novels like John Williams’s Stoner and Vassily Grossman’s Life and Fate. He has also made available the work of previously unknown authors from America and around the world. The catholicity of his taste and judgment have established the NYRB Classics series as among the most prestigious of publishing imprints, and have earned him, among other honors, that of Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
Frank has now published his first book, a critical history of the twentieth-century novel. Frank’s account covers the long twentieth century, beginning his analysis with Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground, which he argues established the model for fiction in the twentieth century—“an exploding form in an exploding world” and concluding with W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz. We met over lunch to discuss his thrilling and insightful volume.
Mitch Abidor: How did you choose the 30 writers you discuss in Stranger Than Fiction? Do their works all reflect, or in some way inflect, your idea that the twentieth-century novel is “an exploding form in an exploding world”?
Edwin Frank: The era called for innovation, because remaking the form of the novel was felt to be the essence of what was occurring. People reflected that new way of thinking about the novel, and in doing so found different ways of reshaping it.
Abidor: When I talk about inflecting, I’m referring to writers who influenced or pushed things in a certain direction. There are some in the book—like Hemingway or Joyce or Proust—who obviously inflected the course of the history of the novel, and others whose influence is less obvious, like Chinua Achebe. My question is broadly to do with your selection criteria.
Frank: With Achebe, it’s a matter of someone who makes it conceivable on an international scale that there will be novels dealing with the history—the present, and the past—of Africa. In that regard, in a direct sense Achebe was influential. And he became the editor of the Heinemann series that published pretty much all the major African writers who were to emerge in the fifties and sixties, on into the seventies and even later. Achebe is an exceptional case. As I say in the book, this was actually an educational endeavor, since it was an educational publisher who brought out his books as a way to create a literate public, which is a precondition of having a tradition of novel writing.
Abidor: We all know Things Fall Apart, and that’s pretty much it. But you’re talking about his role as an editor, which brings us to Edwin Frank, because you, as a publisher, have reflected and inflected the course of the history of the novel in English by making available ways of thinking and writing previously denied us.
Frank: And this book would not have happened had I not had that job. I’ve read novels for as long as I’ve been a reader, but I kind of took them for granted and used them as sources of information—sources of entertainment. There were some that were more gripping, some more demanding, but thinking about the novel as a form was, along with issues of translation, something that my job made a regular habit, and that led to this book.
Abidor: Stranger Than Fiction is a history of the twentieth-century novel, but with an asterisk: available in English. There are writers you don’t know about yet, so it’s provisional.
Frank: Provisional, exactly. I’m not capable of writing an exhaustive history of the novel. That said, England and France, between them, were the places from which the novel radiated out around the world, at least the bourgeois novel as we know it. I tend to think of the bourgeois novel as being a product of modern conditions of living, mass literacy, industrial production … So it is a kind of form that takes shape in Europe, with Europe’s de facto power and cultural prestige. It’s been taken over and adapted elsewhere, and English and French are at the core of that.
Abidor: Were you tempted to write about translation, to dedicate a chapter to it? You start the long twentieth century of the novel with Notes From Underground by Dostoevsky, but it’s also the century of Notes From Underground by Constance Garnett, his first English translator, or by Pevear and Volokhonsky, his recent ones … And then there are novelists who are ill-served or well-served and so enter the pantheon, or are denied entry, through no fault of their own.
Frank: This was something that came up early in my publishing career. I remember looking up Turgenev, who was once the most translated Russian writer. A woman named Elizabeth Hapgood did a lot of those translations before Constance Garnett stepped in, and they’re not very good translations, though she seems to have been an amazing character. She went to visit Tolstoy in the country and lectured him for some of his ridiculous views. But she got the ball rolling, she started a translation tradition. You see it these days with translation from Arabic, which had been neglected, certainly in the United States. The Arabic literary tradition is very old and has its own characteristics, which have been absorbed into modern Arabic novels.
Something I was tempted to write a chapter about is the great Cairo Trilogy of Naguib Mahfouz. The second volume is a series of erotic dreams, which tap into classical Arabic forms with which most American readers will have no familiarity at all. The translator has to find a way to make those forms, with which the reader is unfamiliar, believable and credible. That sometimes takes several generations. My book would not exist without translators, and I say as much in the acknowledgments.
Abidor: Let’s return to your selection criteria. I’ve spoken to you in the past about how I feel Céline got shafted, because he so clearly reflects and inflects the course of the novel. But there’s another writer who I’ve realized since we last spoke who belongs in the book, John Dos Passos.
Frank: I think that’s completely right. I thought a great deal about writing about both. Of the two, I think the greater omission is Dos Passos. I remember I read the USA trilogy as a teenager in a great big Penguin edition on a dare, and friends said, “You’ll never get through that book,” but I was completely taken up by the portraits along the way and the “Camera Eye.” Dos Passos was already very influential. It’s weird because Dos Passos began to pastiche himself in his later books, and then he became practically a Bircher, politically. His readership had dwindled to almost nothing. But he’s a great novelist, as is Céline. There are novelists with a sense of humor in my book, and Céline’s exaggerated, over the top, in-your-face humor, leaving aside the style woven of colloquialisms and every kind of insult and riddled with ellipses … But Celine is a brilliant stylist and a brilliant writer about the awkward interface between the self and society.
I spent a number of years basically reading and keeping a kind of reading diary about what I was responding to, sort of as a kind of mnemonic to keep the books in my mind. I did it alongside other journals I was keeping, so it fit into my life. Then came the Dostoevsky chapter, which took form pretty quickly, and I thought I’d solved all the problems about writing this book. And I went on and I wrote a chapter about André Gide and H. G. Wells as complementary opposites. It took me a while to figure out that the basic thing I’d done in the Dostoevsky chapter, the interweaving of voices I’d done there: a literary historical one, a biographical one, a historical one, and a critical one was the way to go. But once you had two writers in a chapter, there were too many voices. I banged my head against the wall for about a year before I realized that I just had to split this up.
Figuring out what to leave out is always a crucial question in writing, and I had never written anything of this scale. The scale is such that it could potentially go on and on and on. Figuring out how to leave things out took me a long time. I had to leave out a chapter about Conrad, who seemed to me to be an absolutely crucial figure, who invented the political novel of the twentieth century. I was mainly writing about The Secret Agent, but I also wanted to do a little bit about Nostromo, which deals with banana republics, and a little bit about Heart of Darkness, which is about colonialism, but that’s too much. It was actually giving up that chapter that things began to come together. But I regret not having that chapter, because I think Conrad invented the novel where politics is a kind of disease.
Abidor: You’ve spoken of Gide and Wells, and the linking of writers that seem to have nothing to do with each other. Is there any way to explain how you managed to find a place at which they met?
Frank: It’s my habit of mind to think that way, and I suspect that has something to do with growing up with a father who was a Hegelian. Making that kind of comparison across opposites is just something that my mind likes to do, so I don’t really remember being struck there. Likewise, the comparison between—or the contrast and comparison between—Woolf and Hemingway, saying that they have certain fundamental interests in common, a certain heroic sense of the notion of the writer in common, along with their underlying fear, was in my mind pretty early.
The structural issues of a book, which influence the way you think, made it so I liked the second half of my book starting with Woolf and Hemingway, after the first began with Wells and Gide.
My editor, perhaps wanting to make the book shorter, suggested putting two authors together in a chapter that was cut towards the end, which fused Andrei Platonov’s Foundation Trilogy and Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant. I regret it because Platonov, coming out as he does from a Soviet revolutionary moment and way of thinking about art, and the Surrealists, who were the only writers who, in some sense, were more about how writing changes you and possibly changes the world—as opposed to almost all other writers, including Joyce, who are a kind of reflective model, with the novel as a kind of mirror of reality. They changed the nature of the mirror, and they changed the idea of what mirrors can be. But the Surrealists were truly revolutionary writers. Putting them together in one chapter was not what I originally thought of.
Abidor: You focus on the sentence as the fundamental element, the fundamental building block of the novel. You also speak several times about the “American sentence.” What is it that distinguishes an “American sentence” from a sentence?
Frank: It came to me a long time ago, before I had the thought of writing this book. I wrote a short piece about Dreiser’s American Tragedy, another great book that could easily have been in Stranger Than Fiction. Dreiser’s notorious for not being a very elegant or stylish writer. He’s a really messy writer and throws in shapeless sentences, but it’s not just a question of shapeless sentences, he moves from jargon to the poetic. That shapelessness caught something very real about America, a country where people are trying to figure out new languages subject to consuming snake oil, including linguistic snake oil. Dreiser’s messiness, in a way, is not that far from what we see as already there in an antithetical writer like Henry James, or—even more—like Gertrude Stein. It was Stein who realizes this as a defining characteristic of American writing. It’s Stein who lays this out and who raises the matter of how the American sentence can assume any scale. What kind of language to use, what kind of shape sentences can have, these are the kinds of questions that are alive for American writers who are trying in some sense to invent their own idiom, in a way that certain questions about the novel were alive for Russians as well.
Abidor: This takes us back to translation. When we compare an American sentence to, say, an Italian sentence in a translated novel, we’re comparing two English sentences, and the comparison is also between the styles of translators. Something Tim Parks has written about is the internationalization of style. Translations are done so that they fit comfortably in English, and are even written so as to fit English style. So in a way, everyone writes using American sentences, and we don’t know how different they might be from the originals.
Frank: I think that the problems right now are multiple. One is that we have a repertory of novelistic forms. Writers, even if they’re drawing on what was a vanguardist sense of their art, are now working in a tradition. Then there’s the writing school era. There’s the tradition where people come from different countries to learn to write in English. There’s the fact that English retains its use of dialogue and description as a fundamental vehicle for fiction. We’ve reached a point where even nonfiction is supposed to be written that way too, with narrative nonfiction. People write memoirs as if they’re writing a novel about themselves. All of this leads to a formal leveling, and as a result books can be translated into every language because in fact they don’t have any kind of local nitty-gritty in them, formally or in any way. I like to quote Virginia Woolf, who asked, How can we read a Russian novel? We don’t even know what it’s like to walk down a Russian road, or something like that. It’s a question that’s become important again, but novels have become so predictable in their way of digesting reality that that kind of local parochialism is the most radical thing a person can do.
Abidor: If you go into any bookstore in France, you’ll find tons of detective novels in translation, including writers neither you nor I have ever heard of. But some of these genre writers have had a huge impact on world literature. At any time were you tempted to address, say, Raymond Chandler, or Dashiell Hammett, or Georges Simenon?
Frank: Yes, I was tempted by all three, especially Simenon, and I think I even wrote a section about Hammett’s Red Harvest. It was probably in a giant chapter I wrote about work that was cut. Another problem the book raises is that of genre, in the chapter about Wells. The literary novel can be tracked back to Gide, just as our notion of a genre novel can be tracked to Wells. Obviously, there are people who were precursors, like Conan Doyle. To that extent, the question of genre is something literary novelists draw on, they draw on genre writing from genre writers who are wonderful novelists. The split, which doesn’t exist in the nineteenth-century novel, is a defining characteristic, in fact a generative characteristic, of the twentieth-century novel. That said, you’re right: I don’t end up talking about people who worked in either crime fiction or science fiction. I was interested to do Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me, and it certainly would have made sense to talk about more science fiction. But there are also limits of my own reading. Fantasy was very important to me when I was young, and I read a moderate amount of science fiction, but I haven’t read it in a long time.
Abidor: Something that came up in the recently published study of the New York Jewish intellectuals, Write Like a Man: In it the author says that fiction, or novel-writing, had been considered feminine until the twentieth century. Is there anything to that, to who writes and who reads fiction?
Frank: The majority of the readers of fiction is still largely female. If we look back to the nineteenth century, though, you hear that Charlotte Bronte had to write as Currer Bell and Mary Ann Evans had to publish as George Eliot, though the fact that the books were written by women was soon rather well-known. The canonical writers of the English nineteenth century were women. George Sand is perhaps less canonical in French, but the Pléiade recently brought out a volume of her novels. So I do think that some of the energy that comes from the twentieth-century novel—and I don’t write about his—the questioning of the novel, the viewing of it by male writers as a debased form that needs to be brought to life, comes from a reaction against what is seen as sentimental fiction and often fiction that is seen as women’s fiction. But I think that’s also true of women writers. I think they’re distancing themselves from a certain kind of pop fiction of the moment.
Abidor: Your book is pretty uncompromising, dealing as it does with a wide variety of writers—many, if not most of whom will be unknown to most Americans, who famously no longer read. When you were writing your book, did you have an ideal reader in mind, or was that ideal reader you?
Frank: I think my ideal reader is similar to the kind of people we publish the Classics for, who are curious readers who are not hidebound or academic. They’re looking to find out things from books that show what books can be, and they see books as an instrument of discovery. They see the novel in particular as an instrument which has shaped the sensibilities of the reading public on a huge scale for the last century. I do think there’s a way in which this is an enterprise that can only happen when the sheer energy of that moment has passed, when there’s a certain kind of retrospective or elegiac quality.
There are now fewer readers, and there are many other respectable ways of getting entertainment. There’s good TV, things you can listen to, video games, some of which are enormously sophisticated—not that I know anything about them.
So the book doesn’t have its cultural centrality anymore, but that means that for those people who do care about books, for whom books are a present pleasure as well as just a tool, it’s these people who are still attending to them.
Read an excerpt from Edwin Frank’s introduction to Stranger Than Fiction, courtesy of the author and Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
