How novels changed in the 20th century, and why

Book Review Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel By Edwin Frank Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 480 pages, $33 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores. 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 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. 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.” 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. “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. The epigraph to “Stranger Than Fiction,” taken from French philosopher Guy DeBord’s “Comments on the 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.