In search of a new 20th-century canon
By John Mullan
The photo of the author on the jacket of Stranger Than Fiction tells you something. Edwin Frank sits at a small desk, entirely hemmed in by overflowing bookshelves and teetering stacks of books. His reading glasses have been pushed back on his head, so that he can meet your gaze; you have interrupted him in the engrossing business of reading, reading, reading. Stranger Than Fiction is testimony to its author’s sheer appetite for books, and especially for 20th-century fiction at its most testing and ambitious. His article of faith is that the most demanding novels are often the most satisfying.
Frank is the editorial director of the New York Review of Books, and founder of the NYRB Classics series, which specialises in reprints and new translations of often neglected literary “classics” (or should-be classics), especially of the 20th century. It is telling that he became known for championing John Williams’s novel Stoner, reissued as a NYRB Classic in 2005, exactly 50 years after its first publication. Stoner is the story of a man who gives his life up to the love of great literature, pursued despite the petty vindictiveness of managers at the university where he teaches. Frank has presided over this series of “classics” for the general reader during a period when many in American universities have become scornful of any canon of great literary works.
In Stranger Than Fiction, Frank describes his own modern canon, and, refreshingly, without worrying about what the academics might think. He tells “the story of the novel” in the 20th century, claiming inspiration from Alex Ross’s story of modern classical music, The Rest Is Noise. While including works that you would expect, like À la recherche du temps perdu and Ulysses, he offers surprising picks and many translated works. Two-thirds of the novels were originally written in a language other than English. In many cases he is advocating works that he does not expect his reader to know, yet.
In his introduction, Frank recognises that his is “a story of translation in the largest sense, not only from language to language and place to place but more broadly as the translation of lived reality into written form, something the expansive and adaptable form of the novel had from the start been uniquely open to”. For most Anglophone readers, there will be unknown texts recommended here. Frank is an enthusiast for the Austrian Alfred Kubin’s The Other Side, the Brazilian Machado de Assis’s The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas and the Japanese Natsume Sōseki’s Kokjoro. The only American writers who make the cut are Gertrude Stein (for Three Lives, her odd group of fictional biographies of American women), Ernest Hemingway and Ralph Ellison. (And Vladimir Nabokov, if you want to count him as American.) No Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Baldwin, Updike, Pynchon, Morrison, Roth.
The unexpectedness of some of Frank’s choices is just what makes the book entertaining. He tackles some 32 novels, in a series of case studies, starting the 20th century not with, say, Joseph Conrad or Henry James, but with HG.Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau and André Gide’s The Immoralist. He gives rapt attention to Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, acknowledging that the author “sought in empire a refuge from a dangerous and fractured world”, but relishing “its language dense, plastic, encrypted, and alive”. He even half-convinces you that Kipling’s polyglot English, full of the babble of other languages, “anticipates the murmurous, echoic dream language of Finnegans Wake”. The work with which he brings the 20th century to its end is VS Naipaul’s autobiographical novel about his life in the Wiltshire countryside, The Enigma of Arrival.
But, except as a chronological fact, is there such a thing as “the 20th-century novel”? To demonstrate that there is, we start with Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, first published in 1864. According to Frank, Dostoevsky’s sour, utterly disenchanted, self-disgusted monologue, is the first 20th-century novel, avant la lettre. This “unclassifiable” work is “written and rewritten time and time again in the century to come”. It is “the voice of the 20th-century novel”. Take it or leave it: Frank does not much argue for this proposition, but throughout the rest of his book, he will think that he hears echoes of Dostoevsky’s cynical narrator in the oddest places.
Generous, catholic, undogmatic, this is a vindication of novels that push at the boundaries of what fiction can or should do. (There is no room here for the thought that novelistic pretensions might be absurd or disastrous.) The novels chosen are relished for unsettling or upsetting the discerning reader. Indeed, by this account, many of them unsettled or upset the novelists who wrote them. In an epilogue, we peep into the 21st century with WG Sebald’s Austerlitz, published in 2001, but Frank seems to think that there have been “no remarkable changes to the form of the novel” in recent decades.
So, what was “modern” is now past. The clinching phrases that Frank uses to celebrate this fiction’s thoroughly modern resistance to neatness or closure tend to be interchangeable. The Magic Mountain is “a book of studiously opposed contraries”; Sōseki’s Kokoro is “a book of urgent irresolution”; all Lawrence’s fiction is “essentially provisional, unfinished”; Musil’s The Man without Qualities is “an infinite scaffolding around an unbuildable house”. His summarising judgements tend to be once resonant and indistinct: The Enigma of Arrival is “haunted by its precursors, haunted by itself and above all by the fear of not being itself – a fear it shares with so many of its precursors”.
In Frank’s chronological progress through his list of great novels, there is little attempt to trace influences. This is not really a history, which would involve the tracing of impressions and reactions. Frank does this only rarely. We do get Virginia Woolf reading Ulysses, reacting with exasperation and some disgust, but then going back to it for ideas that would shape Mrs Dalloway. Usually, however, when he spies a connection between two of his novels, it is a passing notion, often made in parentheses. (He likes his insights in brackets, like theatrical asides.) As he links Aureliano in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, reading from the book of the mysterious gypsy Melquíades, to Marcel in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, emerging from the library of the Prince de Guermantes, he confides, “I am not making any claim of conscious influence in any of these cases.” Connections between novels are mere impressions.
Frank calls his method “descriptive criticism”, and so it is. He includes for each novel a rapid but vivid biographical sketch of each novelist, seeing each novel rooted in the hang-ups, thwarted desires and, above all, bloody-minded ambitions of the individual novelist. For the potential bluffer, there are then some excellent plot summaries (condensing the plot of Italo Svevo’s Confessions of Zeno or Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual is no easy feat). Yet Frank’s gift for summing up can lead us away from the stuff of the fiction itself. When he stoops to detail, he is at his best, but he does so rarely. His chapter on Hemingway’s In Our Time actually provides some substantial quotations from the work and then tries to analyse the forcefulness of what you have just read. We can see and hear Hemingway’s prose, “its symmetries and repetitions, checking and testing its progress”. In his chapter on DH Lawrence (the only author who is allowed two novels in Frank’s selection), we are given a couple of passages from The Rainbow that do more to illuminate Lawrence’s originality than all the critic’s eloquent advocacy on his behalf.
Proust’s achievement, we are told, was to find “a voice, a tone”, “pitched between the intimate and the impersonal” – “it is this tone that the work is, among other things, about”. But the reader does not get shown, or allowed to hear, this elusive “tone”. We are told that Mrs Dalloway is extraordinary for its use of stream-of-consciousness narration to convey “the intimacy, immediacy, and character of the self and to establish point of view, while also counterpointing the active mind with the worldly activity around it”. You must either agree or not, for there is no illustration of this. The power of One Hundred Years of Solitude is “its extraordinary musicality, the measured flow of its sentences”, but this musicality is a promise rather than a fact on the page – all the more elusive, of course, because we are dealing with translation. Frank is suspicious of what he calls “world literature” – books written in order to be translated, readily understandable anywhere – yet does not investigate what happens when everything is turned into English prose.
We end, eccentrically, with a list. Why these novels, rather than others? Frank, asks, and answers by appending the titles – headed “Other Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel” – of some 94 novels that he has not talked about. One might say in either praise or criticism of what he has done that you can be sure that he could have written equally well about these books too.
New Statesman 23 December 2024
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