Review: Who will shape fiction’s future?
(iStock)“How to go on after all that has gone on?” This question, suggests Edwin Frank in his new book Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel, became one that both society and individuals had to ask as the 20th century wore on and nations slogged through global wars. Through it all, the nature of existence itself remained central.
Frank explores how reality has been presented and even transformed through the way it is molded in fiction—and how the novel evolved from the 19th century novel to that of the 20th century. He enumerates many differences in the two developmental stages of literature’s most popular form. There are also explorations of point of view, plot and the birth of metafiction, as well as the use and manipulation of time.
Yet whose interpretation of life and death are we experiencing when we read this time period’s fiction? Frank’s book cannot help but reflect the bias of the subject it chronicles, one that was for much of the 20th century focused on the experience of two world wars and then on the Cold War that followed. Along the way to making his argument about the differences in the novel across centuries, Frank gives us insight into dozens of authors and their works, ranging from Marcel Proust to Gabriel García Márquez.
For fiction aficionados, this will be a slowly unfolding joy that provides as much information about the authors whose minds created the literature as about the novels themselves. We learn about the upbringings, ambitions, loves, struggles with sexuality, illnesses and pedigrees of the writers—as well as their competitiveness and correspondence with each other, something that suggests how closed of a world literature has been for so long, even if an interloper does steal in every so often with a masterpiece no one saw coming.
What Frank’s book largely does not grapple with, but will be painfully obvious to the discerning reader, is how much the novel has been the product of the wealthy and otherwise idle classes: “Gide did not need to make money from his writing, and he despised the thought of doing so.” His characterization of D. H. Lawrence is that it was “improbable” he became a novelist due to the “obstacles that in his day barred a working-class English boy from the so-called world of letters.” The lens we are looking through when we read 20th-century literature is that of a well-to-do, overwhelmingly white population—and a male one.
There are exceptions: Chinua Achebe, Ralph Ellison and Virginia Woolf are included. Frank also discusses how Natsume Soseki’s Kokoro helped contribute to the development of world literature.
Frank centers his literary criticism of books that developed the 20th-century novel on 32 writers, and he provides an extensive list of additional writers in the book’s appendix. Of the 32 whose works we can call main characters, only six are women. In discussing Gertrude Stein, one of the six, Frank describes her character Melanctha in Three Lives as someone whose “sex and race and life place her outside the space of ‘proper’ storytelling.”
The changes that are being chronicled are those experienced by the privileged white male demographic—and it is only recently that, here in the United States, publishers have begun to actively seek voices outside of this community through initiatives such as We Need Diverse Books. This nonprofit works to promote diverse literature through mentorships for writers and to provide classrooms with books so that all children can see themselves in a story.
As certain narratives are now being removed from classrooms, how will this impact the future novelists of the 21st century? Not only how will it affect these writers and their sense of possibility within a novel’s pages, but how will it influence who becomes a writer and who believes their perspective belongs on the page for others to read?
These remain open questions in an age when diversity, equity and inclusion are demonized. As a result of a wave of anti-diversity agitation in recent years, books exploring race, gender and sexuality have been increasingly banned in school libraries. Banned Books Week, organized by a coalition of literary organizations, free speech organizations and publishers, began in 1982 in response to a rise in the challenges to books read in school—and has continued every year since then. The American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, established in 1967, chronicles the top 10 most challenged books each year. Of the top 10 for the year 2023, the latest year available, seven were deemed objectionable due to L.G.B.T. content.
While being a 20th-century novelist was largely the undertaking of a select class whose members trained themselves through extensive reading and perhaps informal mentorships, one development in the late 20th century was the creation of graduate programs especially designed to train novelists. But although becoming a novelist is now an ostensible career path with hundreds of graduate programs devoted to preparing students to publish fiction, it remains largely an exclusive endeavor.
With the splintering of our attention and media consumption, will this century, like the last, be defined by formative geopolitical events that preoccupy novelists and collectively grip the lives of their readers? Perhaps. For American readers, 9/11 served that role at the turn of the century, as the War on Terror dominated our screens and psyches.
But for some writers, the preoccupation with language supersedes everything. Frank quotes James Joyce: Answering a question about how he spent World War I, Joyce said, “Oh yes, I was told there was war going on.” This, despite the fact that Ulysses is considered by Frank one of the “direct responses to that war, reports from the novel’s front line.”
In the epilogue, Frank spotlights the brilliant W. G. Sebald and his masterpiece Austerlitz, which prefigured the multimedia storytelling that continues to evolve today by combining haunting images with his text: “In their mingling of image and text, Sebald’s pages bear a certain resemblance to pages online, as though the internet were mimeographed.”
In the early days of widespread availability of generative artificial intelligence, we are seeing the potential for creators to call forth visual depictions of the product of their imaginations—and for those depictions to take different shapes depending on the words used to summon them or even the order of the words. It is as if humanity is generating external brains that can conceptualize and make real our wildest dreams. A.I. does this, in part, by drawing on the reservoir of thousands of novels that were uploaded into it without the permission of the writers.
Frank subtitles his deeply researched opus “Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel.” Whose lives will take up the privilege and responsibility of creating the 21st-century novel, and what literary forms will follow it?
The latest from america
