A Cat Chasing a Laser Beam

On Edwin Frank’s ‘Stranger Than Fiction’

Marc Chagall, Self Portrait with Muse (Dream), 1917-18, Oil on canvas

Over the course of 33 days, I read Edwin Frank’s Stranger Than Fiction. I set myself the arbitrary goal of reading exactly one chapter every morning I could, and the overall experience felt like a prolonged conversation with a warm and unassuming friend. In interviews, Frank has clarified that his book does not offer a survey or — “God forbid” — a theory of the novel in the modern era. Instead, with “the structure of something like a traditional biography,” he set out to narrate how the 20th-century novel emerged, changed, struggled, and grew old.

The story involves a cast of more than 30 novels, many of which are established classics (Mrs. Dalloway, Lolita, One Hundred Years of Solitude) while others are less widely known (Hans Erich Nossack’s The End: Hamburg 1943, Anna Banti’s Artemisia, Elsa Morante’s History). Frank includes difficult texts that academics often champion (Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual) and balances these with pulpier bestsellers (H. G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau, Colette’s Claudine at School).

The selection, in other words, is highly personal and eclectic. Yet regardless of stature or reputation, each novel benefits from Frank’s generous attention and genuine enthusiasm. His chapters all share a common architecture: plot summaries and character sketches interspersed with biographical tidbits and historical context from the authors’ lives. These building blocks form the foundation for Frank’s “work of descriptive criticism,” which blends microscopic analysis of words with a telescopic view of the “experience of reading a book.” This method excels in acquainting readers with each novel’s style and emotional resonance.

As the days of reading accrued, however, a thick fog came to cloud my understanding of Stranger Than Fiction’s broader argument. Trying to pin down some guiding thread, I felt like a cat chasing a laser beam, my curiosity perpetually hooked and my satisfaction inevitably eluded. At times, Frank himself seemed aware of how shifty his book could be. More than once, he “thought of the twentieth-century novel as a fictional character in its own right and of this book as an old-fashioned picaresque, full of scrapes and capers, scares and narrow escapes.” What, then, constitutes his plot?

The best answer I could muster goes as follows: In the face of unimaginable and unbearable catastrophes, the 20th-century novel traded certainty for uncertainty, in both content and form. According to Frank, the first novelist to write such a fiction actually belonged to the 19th century, which might give you a sense of just how slippery and speculative his “rough-and-ready category” of the 20th-century novel really is. With Notes from Underground, Fyodor Dostoevsky introduced a “supremely equivocal” and “not just unreliable” but radically unreliable voice into the novel. The archetype of the “Underground Man” would later resurface in the protagonists of Jean Rhys’ Good Morning, Midnight and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Dostoevsky’s setting of an “infinitely squalid retreat in the midst of the inconceivably spreading urban wasteland” would also reappear in Franz Kafka’s work — and so on. While I appreciated the soundness of this idea, noting the prevalence of unreliable narrators and unstable settings struck me as fairly unoriginal, and I seriously questioned how much they were a unique feature of 20th-century fiction to begin with. (I recently read Francisco de Quevedo’s El Buscón, and the same descriptions Frank offers about Notes from Underground could apply to that 17th-century novel.)

As far as the unimaginable and unbearable catastrophes go, for Frank, World War I and World War II take center stage. Although The Magic Mountain, In Search of Lost Time, and Ulysses “are not war books,” he writes, “they were shaped by the [Great War] in ways their authors had not — could not have — foreseen,” and might even be described as “having been written by the war.” Many years later, “the central question of the post–World War II twentieth-century novel” would be, he submits, “How to go on after all that has gone on?” The world wars shaped 20th-century fiction not just during the years of fighting, but before and after as well.

This picture tracks with Frank’s attempt to lay out “how fiction responded to a century of fact,” an exercise that must often rely on sources outside the novels in question. Although he claims that James Joyce wrote Ulysses “with the war in the background,” for instance, he provides no textual evidence for how the war shaped Joyce’s prose or how it otherwise made its way into his novel.

It seems worth noting, then, that other readers with more specialized knowledge have disagreed with Frank’s view on the influence of catastrophes — and, more specifically, the influence of those wars — on the 20th-century novel. A salient example comes from The New Yorker, where the ever-pragmatic Louis Menand argued that “art needs a cultural infrastructure — publishers, galleries, impresarios, critics, prize juries, little-magazine editors, bookstore owners, even professors — to help create an audience for the scandalous and iconoclastic. It’s hard to mobilize these agents when the bombs are falling.” According to Menand, the formal innovation Frank traces — from Gertrude Stein’s sentences to the development of stream of consciousness — “had its origins in peacetime.”

Though I remain unqualified to arbitrate that particular dispute, I can vouch that reading Stranger Than Fiction ultimately felt rewarding, insofar as I could weigh Frank’s claims against my own knowledge. The most enjoyable chapters were the ones about novels I had already read or that touched on historical events I knew more than just the basics about. Curiously, others have recorded a similar experience. Peter Marks, a retired professor of English, noted that Frank’s book “makes you think about what might be an alternative” to his take on the 20th-century novel, and that you “feel intellectually fitter for having read it, even if, perhaps especially if, you disagree.”

This unevenness across chapters spurred me to think about the book as a unified whole and our interactions with it. Many people glorify reading books from cover to cover, but that phenomenon is in some ways quite modern. The experience of reading in antiquity would likely strike us as rather piecemeal today. Anthologies with excerpts of verse or speeches were once enormously popular, and reading usually happened aloud in groups. During the Middle Ages, these practices largely continued, and manuscripts — the forerunners of printed books — typically contained many different and disparate texts. Scholar Mary Wellesley likes to say that a medieval manuscript is more akin to a modern-day bookshelf full of different tomes than to a single book. I found this analogy helpful when thinking about Stranger Than Fiction, which effectively adds up to several books in one.

In simpler terms, all I mean is that what Frank has written might be best enjoyed as a reference book — one to be consulted selectively and discretely, like encyclopedias once were. Given his day job as an editor, this actually makes a lot of sense. Frank founded the New York Review Books Classics series and has headed the imprint for more than 25 years. For readers of fiction, he has been an influential tastemaker in this century, and his impulse to recommend worthwhile texts shines through and beyond his 30-odd central “characters.” In his introduction alone, he lists 19 wide-ranging novelists (from Rabindranath Tagore to Ingeborg Bachmann) that he “would have liked to include,” and in an appendix titled “Other Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel,” he roll-calls several dozen more books — beginning, provocatively, with Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights of 1847.

Such excess is clearly born out of Frank’s sheer love of literature. He “grew up between the pages of novels,” and, fortunately for us, “the better part of [his] adult life has been spent there too.” It felt refreshing to read a book free of utilitarian defenses of fiction — that it develops empathy and so on. Frank is not interested in what novels prove “one way or another,” largely because “in the end it is surely nothing.” What he offers is far more mysterious and transcendent.

This view only crystallized weeks after I finished his book, almost as an afterthought. Stranger Than Fiction is divided into three major sections: “Breaking the Vessels,” “A Scattering of Sparks,” and “The Withdrawal.” I initially paid no attention to these headings, but when I began rereading parts of the book for this essay, I noticed I had no idea what those headings meant. I read György Lukács’ definition of the novel as “the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God,” and suddenly “The Withdrawal” evoked the absence of God. Some religious sleuthing then led me to the Kabbalistic ideas of Isaac Luria, a well-known 16th-century Jewish mystic. According to Luria, when God created the world, he formed vessels full of his divine light. Unable to accommodate divinity, these vessels eventually broke, scattering sparks of divine light everywhere.

Was the 20th-century novel a vessel of divine light that broke under its own formidable pressure? In a book filled with explanations, these titles stand out for their lack of commentary, a kind of poetic restraint. Frank’s gesture is small, but it reminded me of the joys of thinking through written words on one’s own, and how fiction can approximate the infinite and unfathomable.

Ena Alvarado is a writer, researcher, and fact-checker. In 2024, she made her acting debut in her sister’s feature film, Los capítulos perdidos (Lost Chapters). This fall, she will serve as a faculty assistant at the Matthew Strother Center.