Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay, and his first impression was of “daybreak, light and colour and golden and purple fruits at the level of my shoulder”. It’s a memory of morning walks to the Bombay fruit market with his ayah, or nanny. Kipling’s first language was an Indian one. His parents’ house was not far from the Towers of Silence, where the Parsees left their dead to be eaten by vultures. He didn’t understand his mother’s distress when she found a child’s hand in the garden.
Kipling’s parents packed him off to England when he was 5 to live in a household where he was ill-treated by a fanatical evangelical Christian. Locked up alone for hours as punishment, he lived in his imagination. He would grow up to become the great writer, described by Henry James as “the most complete man of genius”, author of The Jungle Book and Kim, apologist for colonialism, eventual winner of the Nobel Prize.
These vivid fragments of Kipling’s life are a fraction of the rich detail on offer in Stranger than Fiction, Edwin Frank’s expansive, lively examination of the 20th-century novel.
Frank, editorial director of New York Review Books, conceived his project after reading an influential work by music critic Alex Ross. Ross’s book, The Rest is Noise, tells the story of modern classical music “in the light of the 20th century’s political, social and technological upheavals”. The book established classical music as a “shaping presence” in the cultural life of the century, influencing bands like Radiohead, for example.
Frank decided to do the same for the 20th-century novel. The task was to write “about art in a way that illuminates the art itself as well as the life of art in the world”. Beginning with Dostoyevsky’s Notes From Underground in 1864 and ending with WG Sebald’s Austerlitz in 2001, Frank examines the work of writers who have sought to reinvent the novel in response to the 20th century. He is interested in the historical forces – especially the world wars and their devastating social and political effects – that have pushed writers to respond, to try to make sense of things, to create works that reflect and measure up to the time.
A novel is a complex thing. Many elements combine to shape it. The writer’s origins are, of course, relevant to every creative choice, and so, with the enthusiasm of a novelist, Frank entertains us with lively stories of writers. He gives us little Kipling locked in the basement, dreaming of India and his ayah. He describes young Dostoyevsky’s harrowing experiences, arrested for criticising the Tsar, subjected to a mock execution, sentenced to four years in a sadistic Siberian gulag where prisoners wear shackles designed to cause pain. We read of André Gide’s efforts to express his homosexuality, Virginia Woolf’s uptightness, and Marcel Proust’s problems with getting published.
It is uplifting reading for any novelist who has navigated the tension between the creative instinct (the urge to experiment and innovate, to follow artistic impulse) and the pressure to be safely conventional, to be published and read.
HG Wells regarded a small readership as a failure but Gide, who went on to win the Nobel Prize, asked for only 300 copies of his novel The Immoralist to be printed. Proust got off to a difficult start: “Sycophantic, a social climber, sickly, as sexually repressed as self-evidently gay, though given to hopeless crushes on both men and women, Proust had earned a solid reputation as a thorough lightweight.”
Proust, a lightweight! His first book was turned down by Gide’s French publishing house, NRF, later known as Gallimard.
Virginia Woolf, who was rightly jealous of Katherine Mansfield’s writing, admired TS Eliot and yearned for his approval. He was rather sniffy about her work, though, and instead raved annoyingly about James Joyce’s Ulysses, a novel Eliot regarded as so innovative and important it was on a par with War and Peace. Woolf buckled down to read Ulysses and didn’t warm to it. On a second, conscientious attempt, she hated it. The novel produced a blast of her famous snobbery: “An illiterate, underbred book; the book of a self-taught working man, and we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking and ultimately nauseating.” This glimpse of Woolf may be illuminating to readers who find her style twee and anaemic. As a critic, she reacted badly to Ernest Hemingway, too, describing his Men Without Women as “faked”.
Hemingway dismissed the Bloomsbury set as “effete and what else? – fakes”. (Class is everywhere. DH Lawrence, the son of a coalminer, was described by his publisher’s son as “the weedy runt you find in any gang of workmen”.)
Rugged, manly Hemingway and sensitive snobbish Woolf were opposites, and yet Frank manages, plausibly, to make a pair of them. He writes that they have in common “a heroic image of the writer as the trailblazer through rubble and glitz”.
As he rolls out, chronologically, the century and its chroniclers, Frank’s focus is on the progressive development of novelistic form. Each of his chosen writers has attempted a fresh structural approach to reflect the character of the time. He describes his novelists as “ambushed by history”, motivated by the urgent sense that the conventional 19th-century novel is no longer adequate to explore the themes of the day.
Frank is interested in the writer as critic: the writer writing while thinking about the form in which he or she is engaged. Stranger Than Fiction begins with Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground, an example of a writer (despairingly perhaps, his nerves in tatters) really going off, letting rip and blowing up the form. The novel is “unclassifiable”, Frank reports; it resembles “nothing so much as a swept-up heap of broken glass”.
He goes on to pair HG Wells and Gide, two very different novelists who arrived at similar, innovative ideas about form. Wells, who wanted to be popular, said, of the novel, “The picture must include the frame.” Highbrow Gide, who wanted only to appeal to a select literary few, developed what he called “mise en abyme”, a metafictional elaboration where the work as a whole finds a reflection of itself in some part of the work. This definition of an aesthetically pleasing structure is the basis for the notion (long held by this reviewer) that a novel should be architecturally designed, as it were, three-dimensionally.
Frank’s sweeping examination of the literary century is highly original, entertaining and lively. Like the best novels, it seldom lags. There are moments: trapped inside Frank’s cheery tolerance of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, it seems as if seven years of plot will never pass. Frank’s description of Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities so engages with Musil’s directionless windiness that it becomes as much of a drag as the novel itself. Frequently, though, Frank’s book will send you eagerly in search of the book it describes.
Gide never lost the novelist’s grim awareness: the work might not work. Novels are always an experiment. As the poet Randall Jarrell put it, “A novel is a prose narrative of a certain length with something wrong with it.”
There’s something wrong with all of them, and something enormously satisfying about Frank’s account of the novelist’s painful quest, to equal the time and transcend it, to create from mere words a novel structure – perhaps even a thing of beauty – that lasts outside of time.
