How novels changed in the 20th century, and why

Edwin Frank is somewhat of a legend. The editorial director of New York Review Books and founder of the New York Review Books Classics series, his discernment has helped shape highbrow literary tastes over the last couple of decades. After all, once you give a book the sleek and instantly recognizable NYRB Classics treatment, you can pretty much guarantee that readers will consider it one.

(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Now Frank has written a book of his own, “Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel.” Taking Alex Ross’ 2007 book “The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century” as a model, Frank’s book (published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, the same imprint as Ross’) makes the case for what, exactly, a 20th century novel is, what its authors’ methods and goals were, and how the unprecedented events of an ever more interconnected world shaped it.

It’s a tall order, and Frank knows it; for one thing, the novel has had different forms, traditions and sensibilities across different languages and cultures. But thinking about how these differences became accessible to more readers as translations of then-contemporary fiction began to proliferate in the 19th century was exactly how he found his approach: “‘In translation’ was the key, opening the way into the story of the novel, which was […] 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.”

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Then, too, there is the sheer hubris of defining key features of a century’s worth of novels, a century during which their numbers were increasing, but Frank is aware of this as well. He freely admits his book isn’t — and indeed can’t be — comprehensive, and that the works he’s chosen to explore are limited, focused especially on major European languages, and that taken together, they don’t constitute a particular or recognizable literary tradition. “My own formulation, the twentieth-century novel,” he writes, “is perhaps best taken as a useful fiction for considering how fiction responded to a century of fact, and though the books gathered and juxtaposed here could be seen to constitute a constellation, it is the limit of constellations […] to exist only in the beholder’s eye.”

True, which is why stargazing is especially enjoyable when you’re with an astronomy geek who can help you identify not only Ursa Major but also Cassiopeia and Pegasus and can elaborate on the myths behind them to boot. Similarly, “Stranger Than Fiction” is a pleasure to read, in part, because of Frank’s enthusiasm for and love of the novel as an artistic medium, and his ability to draw clear and sometimes unexpected connections between a great variety of writers and texts.

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He starts with Dostoevsky’s “Notes From Underground,” published in 1864, which he argues introduced “a conception of reality, and a relation of author and reader to it, that are quite different from reality as it had been previously represented.” Plotless, storyless, “Notes” introduces a narrator who both does and does not map onto its author, expresses opinions that are by turns widely shared and abominable (sometimes both), fluctuates between despair and ecstasy, and deliberately questions its own veracity. These traits, Frank argues, came to define the novel’s voice in the 20th century.

Another feature that crops up again and again is the novel’s new self-awareness and its narrator’s sometimes obsessive turn inward, which used a single life experience as a vessel through which to understand pretty much everything. This approach can be found in books like André Gide’s “The Immoralist,” Marcel Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time” and Thomas Mann’s “The Magic Mountain.”

Another recurring note, Frank finds, is the 20th century novel’s desire to, as H.G. Wells put it, “get the frame into the picture” and thus explore its own artificiality. Rather than trying to merely reflect a certain bourgeois reality, the novel of the 20th century set out to question and maybe even to change it, and reflected this through its experimentations with form, language and time, evident in, for example, Gertrude Stein’s “Three Lives,” James Joyce’s “Ulysses” and Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway.”

Few readers are likely to be familiar with — or even to have heard of — all the books covered in “Stranger Than Fiction,” many of which are works in translation and not obvious classics of the era. It hardly matters, though; Frank does an excellent job summarizing the plots and themes, and introduces the style and tone of each novel whenever possible. He also explores his authors’ biographies and how they mined their own lives for use in their creative work. And, perhaps most strikingly of all, he shows how each novel related to the world in which it was conceived, written and published, and how the authors’ awareness and understanding of their own social and political milieus made a great impact on what they attempted and why.

The epigraph to “Stranger Than Fiction,” taken from French philosopher Guy DeBord’s “Comments on the Society of the Spectacle” (a follow-up to his earlier book “Society of the Spectacle”) is, in a sense, Frank’s broadest thesis: “Our unfortunate times thus compel me, once again, to write in a new way.” The 20th century was full of unparalleled events — the world wars, of course, but also the colonial endeavors that preceded them and empires’ messy retreats in their wake — and many were recognized as paradigm-changing and historical even in their day, and so writers felt the need, consciously or not, to match their moment. Living through our own unfortunate times, there is much we can learn from them, and what a gift to have Edwin Frank’s particular lens through which we can do so.

Ilana Masad is a books and culture critic and author of “All My Mother’s Lovers.”