‘Stranger Than Fiction’ is Edwin Frank’s vigorous study of the evolution of the 20th century novel and the novelists who redirected the genre and its agency with readers navigating a brave and daunting world. Frank is Editorial Director of New York Review Books and has the inside track(at times too inside) and ‘Stranger Than Fiction’ is, indeed, a sweaty and heady dose of comparative literature. He deconstructs the indelible writings of everyone from Dostoyevsky to Prost to Woolf to Hemingway to Colette to Joyce to Garcia-Marquez, and scores of others.
Frank cites music writer Alex Ross’ ‘The Rest is Noise’ as his inspiration. Ross charts the innovations and interplay of composers that defined musical eras. Frank explains in his introduction that “Ross’s book told the story of modern classical music in light of the 20th century’s political, social, and technological upheavals. It took a rarefied Western art form out of the shelter of the concert hall into the streets and factories, cabarets, and concentration camps, connecting the music’s challenging, refractory character to the delirium of modern times.”
He points out that the novel is “a different situation” of course, but writers were similarly confronted with “emergency realism.” They abandoned formulaic plot devices, stock characterizations and other conventions that were not so novel anymore, to go deeper.
The line-up of authors under Frank editorial microscope includes Italo Svevo (Confessions of Zeno), Jean Ryes’ (Good Morning, Midnight), Machado de Assis’s (The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas), Natsume Soseki’s (Kokoro), Marguerite Yourcenar’s (Memoirs of Hadrian) V.S. Naipaul (The Enigma of Arrival) Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita), and that’s the short list.
He begins with an engrossing bio-history of Fydor Dostoevsky, who he cites as a 19th century proto-modernist, with such feral works as Notes from Underground, The Idiot, Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, Demons, et al. Frank provides a fascinating portrait of Dostoevsky, who was a fearless political writer from the start. Fydor was even sentenced to death in 1849 for belonging to a group that was critical of Tsarist Russia. His sentence was commuted to four years in a Siberian prison, then severed six years compulsory military service in exile. Later at the height of his success be became so addicted to gambling that he had to beg on the street. But nothing stopped him from delivering existentialist masterpieces that rocked not only the Russian readers but the whole literary world.
Frank’s rightly focuses on the existentialist writers conjuring post-world war dystopia with surreal environments and characters trapped in their own alienization, this was illustrated most absurdly in
and realizes that he has turned into a giant cockroach. It was a sensation, as Frank reports, Kafka’s other masterpieces The Trial and Amerika however contrived, all projected very real aspects of life in real time.
He also covers the impact that gay writers, however closeted they were publicly, had on the vaulted literary establishment. artistically impacting the whole field as well as the starchy literary world. //
The chapter on Andre Gide describes his hedonistic gay life, and open criticism of French society. academia, and culture at large. Gide populated his books with gay and bisexual characters. The most famous being ‘The Immoralist’ and ‘The Counterfeiters.’ He was passed over for a Nobel Prize because of his sexuality but eventually was awarded one. Frank characterizes the narratives of his books as “Mirrors in mirrors of mirrors.”
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In a few chapters Frank overpacks with content that would be better served in the book’s endnotes. In his chapter ‘The Whole Story of America’ he writes about- Delmar Schwartz, William Faulkner, Herman Melville and other matters- before he gets to Ralph Ellison, ostensibly the main subject of chapter and his groundbreaking book ‘The Invisible Man.‘ *
Even though Frank’s magisterial debriefs can read like he’s lost in his own literary maze, when he gets out of his own way, he is brilliant. Consider his fine- line portrait of Virgina Woolf ‘s creative breakthrough as she formulates the aesthetic purpose of her masterpiece ‘Mrs. Dalloway.’ Woolf being obsessed with the success of James Joyce’s Ulysses.
It is analysis of Woolf’s singular literary genius and insights into the self-doubts that haunted her. After comparing notes on Joyce with T.S Eliot (who loved Ulyssess) Woolf reread it and again not buying into Joyce’s haughty conceits and still convinced that “She hated it” so much so that she wrote ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ as her antidote.
Frank tells a great story with this chapter and sums up the importance of Woolf’s masterpiece, writing “It is a book about the self, the tyrant self, the lonely self, the self that is blind to itself, the self as free agent the destroyed itself, the mystery that is the self. But no less about the other, the other as the beloved. The other we always let down, neglecting, avoiding, ignoring, betraying. And then again the other, that is the self. It is about those things and also about the world at large.”
Such insight makes ‘Stranger Than Fiction’ certain worth wading through some of Frank’s streams of literary consciousness.
*Speaking of invisible, one might wonder why Frank didn’t consider Edgar Allen Poe as a proto-modernist, by virtue of his plots teeming with Freudian subtexts baked into his gothic horror stories- but I digress- note to editor…never mind
