Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel

This sophisticated analysis from Frank (Snake Train), a poet and editorial director of New York Review Books, studies how Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, Ralph Ellison, and other novelists refracted historical, philosophical, and social change through their writings. Viewing the 20th-century novel as more of an attitude than a strict category, Frank suggests that Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s 1864 novella Notes from the Underground laid the groundwork for 20th-century literature by embracing an unvarnished form of psychological realism that sought not to make sense of political and social crises but to reflect them in its fragmented, “helter-skelter” prose. Elsewhere, Frank suggests that Kafka’s convoluted run-on sentences in Amerika capture the “relentless pressure of time” that characterizes modernity, and that James Joyce’s Ulysses aspired to reinstate a notion of the universal after the factionalism of WWI. Frank doesn’t make any pretenses to comprehensiveness, focusing largely on books “written in major European languages” before 1960, but he distinguishes himself as an erudite tour guide who, while never arriving at anything resembling a unified theory of the 20th-century novel, still sheds light on numerous thematic and aesthetic through lines, all presented in sinewy prose (“Notes resembles nothing so much as a swept-up heap of broken glass”). This rewards and delights. (Nov.)