Is the novel in mortal peril, or remarkably resilient?
That is the kind of dust kicked up by “Stranger Than Fiction,” a rattling heritage railway train of history and criticism by Edwin Frank that seems especially attractive at this post-election moment, when many are worried that America is about to run right off the tracks.
Clamber on, pull open a window — as one used to be able to before the era of climate control and climate catastrophe — and let the air cool your perspiring face.
Frank is the editorial director of New York Review Books, the publishing arm of the intellectual journal, and founder of its Classics series, which revives old works, many in translation. He is, to quote a now-famous headline on the obituary of Frank O’Hara, also a poet.
He lavished more than a decade on this book, inspired by what the music critic Alex Ross did for 20th-century composition in “The Rest Is Noise,” but there’s little sign of strain or, for that matter, finitude. Having closely examined over 30 novels in a spirit of heady intoxication, he tacks on a list of 90-plus he might have included, as if the bar-car porter were cutting him off.
Frank analyzes other authors’ titles, sometimes at length, but doesn’t directly explain his own, so I’ll hazard a guess: that he chose these novels because they were more than made-up stories intended to distract or soothe, like so much of what’s on the current best-seller list.
Indeed, they did the opposite of soothe. Many emerged from despair, and they provoked and shocked; they reflected or interpreted reality in some way more accurately than news reports: the gas chamber scene through the eyes of a young boy and the woman holding him in Vasily Grossman’s “Life and Fate”; Okonkwo’s self-destruction in Chinua Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart”; the baggage animals, their forelegs broken, left in shallow water by the fleeing Greek Army in Ernest Hemingway’s “In Our Time.” These works have had a kind of “strange” mystical power that has outlasted — no, immortalized — their authors.
But what is a novel, anyway? There are signs that the term has softened, the way that even music from the Romantic period is now called “classical”; these days younger generations often use the word to mean any “serious” book. In Slate 10 years ago, Ben Yagoda attributed this taxonomic confusion in part to the rise of the graphic novel, and Truman Capote’s deciding to call “In Cold Blood” a nonfiction novel.
Frank shows that the boundaries were porous long before, and continue to shift. He begins with Dostoyevsky’s “Notes From Underground”: “an unclassifiable work,” he writes, “at once confession and caricature,” whose various forms of attack resemble “nothing so much as a swept-up heap of broken glass.” He ends with “Austerlitz,” by W.G. Sebald, whose pages, intermingling text and image, “bear a certain resemblance to pages online, if the internet were mimeographed.”
In between, Frank reminds us that “In Search of Lost Time” grew out of an essay against a literary critic into “a book, in short, about everything Proust had ever known or felt or read or thought about or done.” (Could rage at Goodreads elicit something similar?) “In Our Time” is a collection of short writings usually classified as short stories. Gertrude Stein’s “Three Lives” is, also, three stories, yet he includes it for its pivotal influence in the “liberation of the sentence.” And he describes Georges Perec’s listy “Life a User’s Manual” as “this weird, nubbly thing,” all too easy to put down.
There’s no arguing with Frank’s choices: They are convincing, idiosyncratic and often felicitous. (The protagonist of V.S. Naipaul’s “The Enigma of Arrival” visits, as Naipaul himself did, the 1984 Republican convention in Dallas. Norman Mailer, of course, did the ’68 conventions. Our best minds, since David Foster Wallace, now seem to prefer cruise ships.)
Anyway, argument is the point. He argues with himself.
“Stranger Than Fiction” is divided into three parts, roughly chronological but also continually traveling back and forth to show how writers borrow from and react to one another’s work over decades. (“The 20th-century novel is always coming back to the primal scene of the 20th-century novel, shocked once again by its own creation,” Frank proclaims after linking Gabriel García Márquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude” to Gide, Soseki and Proust, again.) Maybe we’re not in a heritage train after all but a DeLorean time machine, put together by a benevolent mad scientist, a professor offering a luxury seminar for a bargain-basement price. Reviewing it means risking listiness oneself, but never listlessness; this is a passion project, not a syllabus.
He does go into the authors’ actual lives, and makes them more present and that terrible word, relatable. He shows which knew each other and interacted, supportively or admiringly and consequentially in ways that seem hard to imagine in today’s world of public, fleeting flattery. H.G. Wells and Henry James had a big falling-out. D.H. Lawrence invited E.M. Forster for a country weekend — “Forster is here. He is very nice,” he wrote in a letter — tried to convert him from homosexuality and then gossiped about it to the philosopher Bertrand Russell. (Both friends dropped Lawrence.) Virginia Woolf fumed in her diary about her friend T.S. Eliot’s admiration of James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” calling it “illiterate” and “underbred” — but then was motivated to rewrite it in the form of “Mrs. Dalloway.”
One closes the rousing and fully committed “Stranger Than Fiction” not really closing it — which I think is Frank’s intention — but feeling hunger for a big new novel that confronts today’s America, where as he writes, paraphrasing a Delmore Schwartz character in a chapter about Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man,” “everyone is unhappy in a way that they could only be in a country dedicated to the pursuit of happiness in the form of bathtubs.”
“Literature,” he declares elsewhere, “is the power to breach.” Let now be its finest hour.
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