Stranger Than Fiction and the Endurance of the Novel (as Form)

D. W. White

Book Review

A review of Edwin Frank’s Stranger Than Fiction (FSG). Purchase the book directly from the publisher here.

In the way of a stray dog following one home, or a young, little-known child asking why on repeat, “commentators” have been wondering, aloud and in ink, what has become, or might become, or should become, of the “form of the novel.” Here at the end of history, 2025, we can of course look back on these questions with the warm expectancy of answers (although we’ll leave them for another time just now). But in those dark days of the previous millennium, when people called each other through heavy spiraling cords to talk about “plots” and “fiction” and “authors” as if they were real, discrete ideas, everyone thought that there was such a thing as the novel, and that it could appear in the many shapes of Proteus, cunning and elusive on his rock. This is the wonderful state of affairs explored and elaborated by Edwin Frank in his new book—what we might call a popular critical history—Stranger Than Fiction, a compendium of the novel in the long twentieth century (from Dostoevsky to Sebald), and a welcome repost to the tired elegies poured over our most elliptical art form.

Frank, the Editor of the NYRB Classics series (with which, full disclosure, both Editors of this illustrious literary concern are highly enamored and from which, just saying, said journal would not refuse more books), begins conversationally, something like a kindly, avuncular iteration of Erich Auerbach’s seminal Mimesis—indeed, there’s a depth to that parallel running throughout Stranger Than Fiction, which is (like Mimesis) broken into sizable, thematic chapters begun in medias res and centered on one or two books, then organized in a loose chronology. It is also, however (unlike Mimesis), an eminently accessible study, one that asks little yet offers much. In fact, it may be that Stranger Than Fiction is at its most enjoyable when the reader hasn’t read the book under consideration for a given chapter; Frank is adept at distilling a novel (including the most monumental) into a quick page or so of synopsis, lending the reader a solid footing before getting onto the fun of commentary.

This is not to imply that Frank doesn’t have critical bona fides, however, or that his book is merely a superficial account of the history of other books. (Indeed, as he says in the Introduction, his survey is largely idiosyncratic to his own tastes; a true sweep of the 20th century novel would be as unwieldy as it would be reductive.) Stranger Than Fiction has something significant to say, starting right off in that Introduction, about what the “novel as a form” may be:

By “looks closely” I mean simply that [my book] looks at the kinds of things these books show us in relation to the kind of show they make. This is how any work of art demands that we look at it: form is always another form of content. When we look closely at the novel in the twentieth century, we see an art form of extraordinary amplitude put under unprecedented ongoing stress, and we see too that certain novels—the ones I look at here, particularly—respond to that stress by radically reshaping the novel as a literary form.

This direct, easygoing, yet perspicacious approach is all the more notable, and needed, given the state of contemporary criticism about the contemporary novel; one can’t help but think of all the incredible angst generated around questions such as “what is the novel in light of our current moment?” or “are we living in a ‘postfictional’ age?” or “help, I’ve lost my mind over the word ‘autofiction’ and don’t know how to think about books anymore.” Among the accomplishments of Stranger Than Fiction is to remind us that these questions about what the novel is, holistically and compositionally, and how (or if) it can survive given the changes in the world and our lives, are not new—even, and especially, if we believe they are, relative to earlier times when they were asked just as seriously. That Stranger Than Fiction makes this statement silently, as it were, both underscores its conviction in its claim and makes the disquiet itself seem not a little foolish.

These questions were certainly asked in the years around the First World War, when (for my money) the best literature was written and (in my view) Stranger Than Fiction is at its best, prenominate proviso re: unread books notwithstanding. Frank’s analogizing of the war and the tempestuous dynamic between Proust’s Albertine and her narrator (who bears a striking resemblance to the author)—“the deadlocked and destructive nature of the relationship between the two lovers resembles nothing so much as the war in the trenches that had yet to take place at the time the story is set, but that was going on and going nowhere as Proust wrote it”—inaugurates his sharp analysis of la Recherche, The Magic Mountain, Ulysses, and Mrs Dalloway:

But Ulysses differs profoundly from The Magic Mountain and In Search of Lost Time in its relation to language. Proust and Mann are of course great artists in language, but the greatness of their art arises in relation to and serves to highlight language’s capacity, sometimes treacherous, for transparency. Ulysses is not like that. Ulysses puts language up front and center. And Ulysses is completely without a discursive or even reflective, much less edifying, dimension, a whole dimension of literature that Joyce as good as rips up and throws away.

Frank is probably at his very best, however, in blending biographical sketches of authors with smart, creative reads of their books. His chapter on Mrs Dalloway covers Woolf’s thinking about (believe it or not) the novel as an art form, including a note on “Mr Bennet and Mrs Brown” and discussions of her complicated relationship with Ulysses. As Frank points out, the years following The Great War completely upended conventional understandings of art (far more so, one must say, than social media-infused anxieties over the first person autobiographical mode), and Woolf, while worried about her age and her health, desperately wanted to be on the forefront of the new world. Of course she did become that vanguard—Frank astutely sees Mrs Dalloway as “representative of Woolf’s utopian wish to recover the balance and scope of the nineteenth-century novel in a form appropriate to our times”—but not without the trails demanded of the artist. The blending of the personal and the critical works to humanize Stranger Than Fiction, nowhere more so than in considering Woolf’s preoccupation with Joyce’s magnum opus:

I think, too, that Woolf may well have been sensitive to and scared by the madness of Ulysses. Because if the book puts everything together, it does so with a mad single-mindedness, playing as it were by nothing but its own rules. Joyce himself was alert to this aspect of his book: each chapter, we have seen him remark, left a scorched field behind. Woolf, for her part, had personally experienced how the mind consumes itself in madness. What held Joyce together threatened to tear her apart.

Indeed it is this human touch which makes Frank’s project an especially interesting and successful one, leaving the reader with a feeling of having witnessed the evolution of the novel from the genetic level. There is such a thing as the novel, and indeed the novel as a form; there are good reasons to ask good questions about it. It’s not going anywhere, however, something imperative to keep in mind if we’re going to continue resisting the disparagement of art and literature in our modern age. Stranger Than Fiction is thereby an expansive, illuminating, welcoming book; a useful (and more useful for its lack of critical pretension) retrospective on where the novel started and what it’s lately become, a bridge back to the art and thought of the twentieth century—and a reminder, for the twenty-first, that the story is far from over.

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Stranger Than Fiction

Edwin Frank

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

$33

480pp

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D. W. White also serves as Prose Editor for West Trade Review and Publisher of Indirect Books, a new independent press launched this year. His writing appears in 3:AM, The Florida Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Necessary Fiction, and Chicago Review of Books, among others. He is currently pursuing his Ph.D. in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he teaches fiction workshop along with classes on Modernism and Rachel Cusk.