Stranger than fiction Lives of the twentieth-century novel

Borges believed that great readers were rarer even than great writers. On the strength of his first work of literary criticism, Frank, founder and editor of the remarkable New York Review Books imprint, is of that rare breed. Frank's ambition was to do for the twentieth-century novel something like what Alex Ross did for twentieth-century music: to write a history that also expresses passionate appreciation. Quibbles with the 32 novels Frank chose to focus on as exemplars are inevitable, and miss the point. Frank isn't arguing for an old or new canon. Instead this is as much about what writers make of the books they read as it is about the books they write, while doing without the trappings of a theory like the anxiety of influence. Fiction demands "not suspension of disbelief," but "an attitude of inquisitive credulity--and an awareness, happy or unhappy, that the truth as it appears to us is always subject to further consideration." Each chapter is a reading of writers living as readers writing their life and times. Frank really might be one of those readers who have read everything, and every chapter thrills to the telling detail, passionate engagement, and careful argument. This is eye-opening, delighted, close reading.

This sophisticated analysis from Frank (Snake Train), a poet and editorial director of New York Review Books, studies how Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, Ralph Ellison, and other novelists refracted historical, philosophical, and social change through their writings. Viewing the 20th-century novel as more of an attitude than a strict category, Frank suggests that Fyodor Dostoyevsky's 1864 novella Notes from the Underground laid the groundwork for 20th-century literature by embracing an unvarnished form of psychological realism that sought not to make sense of political and social crises but to reflect them in its fragmented, "helter-skelter" prose. Elsewhere, Frank suggests that Kafka's convoluted run-on sentences in Amerika capture the "relentless pressure of time" that characterizes modernity, and that James Joyce's Ulysses aspired to reinstate a notion of the universal after the factionalism of WWI. Frank doesn't make any pretenses to comprehensiveness, focusing largely on books "written in major European languages" before 1960, but he distinguishes himself as an erudite tour guide who, while never arriving at anything resembling a unified theory of the 20th-century novel, still sheds light on numerous thematic and aesthetic through lines, all presented in sinewy prose ("Notes resembles nothing so much as a swept-up heap of broken glass"). This rewards and delights. (Nov.)

A history of the 20th-century novel that examines, contextualizes, and draws connections among work by more than 30 authors. Frank, editorial director of New York Review Books, presents his essays in three parts, chronologically ordered. The text, he notes, is a working example of "descriptive criticism, as practiced by such critics as Clement Greenberg, Randall Jarrell, Pauline Kael, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Greil Marcus." Following a preface about Dostoyevsky'sNotes From Underground (1864), which "resembles nothing so much as a swept-up heap of broken glass," the first section encompasses works from the last few decades of the 1900s through the end of World War I, including titles by Wells, Proust, Joyce, and Thomas Mann, whose bookThe Magic Mountain (1924) Frank deems "a new form of the twentieth-century novel, a form born of the war whose new significance could only be fully appreciated after the war." The middle, beginning withMrs. Dalloway, covers a "period of astonishing invention." In the final section, the author examines the novels of the mid- to late 1900s, fromThings Fall Apart toOne Hundred Years of Solitude and beyond. Frank is a dogged enthusiast whose optimism almost always wins out, often for reasons related to positive emotions. Writing about Kafka'sAmerika, for example, he comments, "The book is one ongoing disaster, yet much of it is oddly cheery in tone." Frank's curiosity and scope are both admirable, and his prose style is consistently punchy, despite some repetition--e.g., "Kipling was a restless man"; "Thomas Mann…is a restless man"; D.H. Lawrence was the "most restless of writers." The most controversial thing about this book may be the appeal that it makes for its own existence. While it may strike some as gratuitous, devoted literature fans of canonical literature will relish it. Academic yet accessible, with special appeal to avid readers of classic lit. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.