As I’m typing this, to my left is a very long shelf that mostly contains novels by Barbara Pym, Muriel Spark, Beryl Bainbridge, Brian Moore, and Marly Youmans. A shelf above has a run of novels by Thomas Pynchon next to a number by Thomas Bernhard. Another shelf features Peter Handke. A photo of Herta Muller makes me think of a big stack of her novels upstairs. Ditto a photo of Solzhenitsyn. And what about all the crime novelists and writers of science fiction I love and admire?
This list simply represents my own interests and some randomness. This is to say, when people talk about “the novel” or even about “books,” they are necessarily talking about the novels and books they happen to have read and heard of and become interested in. People talking about books can easily talk past each other. Academics have a solution to this, which is to act tribally and all focus on the same things at the same time. Most books on “the novel” are written by academics. In principle, I have nothing against their tribe. Many of my dear friends are academics. I read university press books voraciously. However, for some years now, particularly on certain subjects, academic scholarship has been infected by viruses of the mind. Recent books dealing from one angle or another with “the novel” are among those most likely to be exasperating in this way.
Edwin Frank, however, is not an academic. He’s an editor with an encyclopedic knowledge of fiction, and he writes from a fresh angle. Frank has, for 25 years, been the editor of the wonderful book publishing imprint NYRB Classics, founded in 1999 with Frank presiding. His new book about the 20th-century novel Stranger Than Fiction draws on a quarter century of reading and searching through writing, which may explain why it is much better than so many similar attempts.
For me, it triggered a fantasy of time travel back to the days of NYRB Classics’s founding. In my mind, I revisited one of the bookstores where I prowled the aisles in those days and where I encountered the first titles published under that new imprint. I felt a sudden urge to reread the wonderful Italian writer Leonardo Sciascia, whom I discovered years ago thanks to NYRB Classics. I found myself scanning my shelves (not to mention stacks on the floor), trying to remember when and where I acquired a particular title. One I bought ages ago at an airport bookstore in Washington, D.C., when I had a longer-than-expected wait for a flight back to Chicago. Another I acquired just a few years ago at the blessed Prairie Path Books in Wheaton, Illinois.
Stranger Than Fiction draws not only on a career in publishing but on a lifetime of reading. To say this is not remotely to suggest that you will be persuaded on all points by Frank’s account of the modern novel, which actually begins in the mid-19th century with Dostoevsky. If you are an opinionated reader, at times, you may be tempted, as I was, to fling his book across the room. However, I think it unlikely that you will regret the investment of time and money.
H.G. Wells and Andre Gide are among the novelists to whom he gives extended attention early on. The section that includes Franz Kafka also includes a writer I’ve never read, Alfred Kubin (born in Bohemia in 1877). The following chapter couples Colette with Rudyard Kipling.
Here’s how Frank’s introduction starts:
“This book began over the kitchen sink a long time ago. I was doing the dishes after dinner. A CD of Radiohead’s album Kid A was playing, which got me thinking about a recently published book, The Rest Is Noise, by the classical music critic (and Radiohead fan) Alex Ross. Ross’s book told the story of modern classical music in light of the twentieth century’s political, social, and technological upheavals; it took a rarefied Western art form out of the shelter of the concert hall into streets and factories, cabarets and death camps.”
When I first read this, I experienced whiplash. For a split second, I imagined myself at the sink, a CD playing in the background. However, then, the business of taking “a rarefied Western art form out of the concert hall into streets and factories, cabarets and death camps” hit with a dull thud, and I thought I might just stop right there. Fortunately, I didn’t. I’m glad I continued to read, disagreements and differences in taste notwithstanding. When I finished the epilogue on W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, I had plenty to chew on.
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Of course, I also found myself thinking about writers and novels that Frank didn’t even mention in passing, let alone zero in on. You will have the same reaction if you read the book. However, that’s not a criticism. Rather, it’s a reminder that five different writers could take up such a project and write five different books on the subject with surprisingly little overlap. No two readers have exactly the same diet of fiction, nor do they read any given book in just the same way. The joy of a book such as Stranger Than Fiction is in getting a warm invitation to see into the readerly world of Frank without any demand to come live in it forever. You may want to stay awhile.
John Wilson is senior editor of the Marginalia Review of Books.