Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review by Walter Cummins
For many readers of Edwin Frank’s Stranger Than Fiction, an immediate satisfaction will be Frank’s close consideration of more than thirty novels written throughout the world in the twentieth century, including almost all of the most significant works, with the list enlivened with choices that are little-known surprises. As a source, it’s unlikely that many other critics know more works than Frank, a poet whose day job is editorial director of New York Review Books, a series noted for rediscovering important out-of-print novels.
Frank devoted fifteen years to preparing this book. While the novels he chose to include is a valuable list in itself, even more meaningful are his insights into the novels themselves as he links facts of author biography with the works themselves and explores the many relationships of the century’s classics with each other.
As rich as the chapters devoted to specific titles are, the book’s real achievement is Frank’s development of his thesis that a thematic unity binds twentieth-century fiction in a manner that distinguishes it from the body of work written in the nineteenth century.
Frank considers the similarity of issues and the shared concerns of the authors in the books they wrote: “Literature makes its own demand on our attention, and the power of literature—to respond to the times, to transform our perceptions and our lives, to be itself—is not only my subject but also something that all the books here struggle to engage and bring to light.”
Although his title singles out twentieth-century novels, his beginning of the approach that shapes the writing of the past century goes back to Dostoevsky’s 1864 novella Notes from Underground and the voice and crises of that tormented soul. The Underground Man’s struggles provide the roots that define and shape the character struggles found in the major novels to appear in the century ahead.
Frank finds a transformative shift from the plot-driven novels of the nineteenth century: “Plot, however, is equally a sign that the book as a whole is under authorial and perhaps even providential control: the continuities will be maintained, and everything will at last come round, at least if the novel is any good. And plot finally engages the reader as the judge of whether in fact it is any good.”
Notes from Underground is nothing like such novels. Rather than story, voice dominates, equivocal and radically unreliable. The Underground Man serves as an archetype for the voice of the twentieth-century novel, reborn in Bellow’s Dangling Man, Ellison’s Invisible Man, Kafka’s K and Joseph K, and in novel after novel written throughout the century, including those by Beckett, Nabokov, and even Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint.
The heart of Frank’s analyses offers evidence to substantiate links to Dostoevsky’s novella. For example, Mann’s The Magic Mountain, “. . . preserves an image of unity by telling the story, down to the last detail, of a world whose pieces no longer come together. A world that was, the reader knows, in fact doomed to explode.” The following chapter on Proust and In Search of Lost Time depicts Albertine’s confining room as a “place of terminal confinement, looks back to the Underground Man’s mousehole and forward to the ever more constricting rooms and beds and jars and holes inhabited by Samuel Beckett’s destitute narrators.”
By the conclusion of his book, Frank wonders if the works he has identified as twentieth-century have played out their continued existence before the last decade of the period. He asks if impatient readers and writers have given up on the backgrounds necessary for serious reading. But then he proposes W.G. Sebald and his Austerlitz as the possible first example of a transition novel to the next period of novel writing.
Frank calls Austerlitz the character “a descendant of the Underground Man, still lost in the abstract and hallucinatory city, but his voice is different. The voice of the Underground Man—angry, self-justifying, self-pitying, self-punishing, prophetic, pathetic, out of control—can’t be pinned down. It snarls and squirms and slips off into the twentieth-century novel. The voice of Austerlitz , the voices of Austerlitz, are by contrast almost preternaturally level, and the story that Austerlitz tells the narrator, improbably unfolding as a series of coincidences, is to be taken entirely at face value. This man of sorrows is the ultimate reliable narrator, and listening to him, we are led to believe that the truth is at hand; maybe we are even beginning to understand.”
In Stranger Than Fiction, Frank makes a case for a unity of characteristics that bind the major novels of the twentieth century as he has so many examples to read closely for evidence of social disorder and destructive wars. On the other hand, Austerlitz is just one novel whose promise of understanding lacks decades of fiction with a similar perspectives for the century ahead. Will the novel continue to be the most significant art form of our time? Will any art form possess the power to bring meaning to all our uncertainties?
