Is the Twentieth-Century Novel a Genre? | The New Yorker https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/11/18/stranger-than-ficti...
A Critic at Large
Is the Twentieth-Century
Novel a Genre?
An ambitious new book sees hidden currents linking writers as disparate
as Colette, Thomas Mann, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Ralph
Ellison, and Chinua Achebe.
By Louis Menand
November 11, 2024
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In the nineteenth century, few people viewed �iction as an art; it was regarded as mere middle-class
entertainment. But in the next century no other medium received more earnest critical
attention. Illustration by Ben Denzer; Source illustrations by Mara Bailey, George Olsen, Lily Of�it, and David
White
Save this story
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G enres are the Sirens of literary criticism. They seem friendly and
alluring, but they are dangerously elusive shape-shifters. You really
have to lash yourself to the mast.
Genres tend to be pictured as the bones of literary texts, the formal
properties onto which the imagery and details of character, plot, and setting
are grafted. These skeletons are transmissible across time. So “Oedipus Rex”
(circa 430 B.C.E.), “Hamlet” (circa 1600), and “Death of a Salesman” (1949)
are all called tragedies. But, apart from unhappy endings, those plays are
more different than they are alike. It is hard to extract a robust de�nition of
“tragedy” that works for all three. Similarly, we call the Odyssey an epic. But
why isn’t it a novel? Because it’s written in verse? Then how about a prose
translation: would that be a novel? It’s not obvious why it wouldn’t. The
Odyssey is a story about a family separated by war. So is “War and Peace,”
and we don’t categorize that as an epic.
There is also the problem of basing our generalizations about literary types
on a highly selective group of texts. Of the hundreds of tragedies estimated
to have been written in ancient Greece, we know of only thirty-two complete
ones, attributed to just three playwrights. We don’t know all the forms that
tragedy, as the Greeks understood it, might have taken.
In the case of a genre like the novel, too, we are operating with a ridiculously
small sample size. As Franco Moretti pointed out, in an article published in
2000, when literature professors talk about “the nineteenth-century British
novel” they are talking about roughly two hundred books. He estimated that
this is 0.5 per cent of all the novels published in Great Britain in the
nineteenth century.
His work inaugurated a wave of data mining, in which formal elements of
the novel—such as the use of quotation marks or chapter titles, or the rise
and fall of subgenres, like detective �ction—could be charted on graphs. He
founded the Stanford Literary Lab to undertake this kind of quantitative
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scholarship. Hard hats were required inside the building.
Moretti touched a nerve because no genre had received more critical
attention in the twentieth century than the novel. For many critics, the novel
was the king of genres, a literary form that enjoyed a unique intimacy with
reality. Everyone seemed to know which books the term picked out, what the
generic bones of the novel were, and why novels mattered. People talked
about “the death of the novel” as though it could mark an in�ection point in
the history of civilization.
I n the nineteenth century, few people had thought of the novel as an art
form in the same league as painting or classical music. The novel was a
mode of middle-class entertainment. One of the �rst writers to insist on
�ction as an art was Henry James, who analyzed the formal features of the
novel in the prefaces he wrote for the multivolume New York Edition of his
work (1907-09); these analyses are still cited today. ( James launched the
New York Edition in the hope of boosting his book sales. Alas.)
In 1916, the Hungarian critic Georg Lukács published (in German) “The
Theory of the Novel,” another in�uential treatment of the genre. “The novel
is the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God” was his memorable
de�nition. The genre was further explored by Mikhail Bakhtin, in Russia, in
essays collected in “The Dialogic Imagination,” and by F. R. Leavis, in
England, in “The Great Tradition.” But the de�nition that became standard
in literature departments was the one put forward by Ian Watt in “The Rise
of the Novel” (1957). The term Watt used was “formal realism.”
The novel’s mission, Watt said, is to provide “a full and authentic report of
human experience.” This is the effect that a novel’s formal features, from the
types of characters it invents to the kind of language it uses, are all devised to
produce. When we read a novel, Watt said, we feel that we are getting “the
facts,” even though what we are reading is pure make-believe. To the extent
that what we are reading seems fragmentary or discontinuous or not credible,
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we are not reading a novel.
Watt was writing about the eighteenth-century English novel—Defoe,
Richardson, and Fielding. Lukács was writing about the nineteenth-century
European and Russian realist novel. The question Edwin Frank asks in his
new book, “Stranger Than Fiction” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), is whether
there is such a thing as the twentieth-century novel. Is it pro�table to talk
about the twentieth-century novel as something different from the
nineteenth-century novel or, for that matter, from the twenty-�rst-century
novel? Frank thinks so: in his view, the twentieth-century novel is a distinct
literary genre, and his book is an ambitious, intelligent, and happily
unpretentious effort to map it.
Frank was inspired, he says, by “The Rest Is Noise,” Alex Ross’s history of
twentieth-century music. “Could the same thing be done with the novel?”
Frank wondered. After overcoming some doubts, he decided that maybe it
could, and so he set out to help readers understand the literary equivalents of
twelve-tone music and bebop. The result is a book about books that can
seem demanding or off-putting, books that are particularly long (like James
Joyce’s “Ulysses” and Marcel Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time”) or
particularly weird (like Gertrude Stein’s “Three Lives” and Machado de
Assis’s “The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas”) or both (like Robert
Musil’s “The Man Without Qualities” and Georges Perec’s “Life: A User’s
Manual”).
Frank is not a literature professor, and this is not a literature professor’s book.
He is the editorial director of New York Review Books and the founder of its
Classics series—a wonderfully eclectic array of reprints, collections, and fresh
translations of works famous and neglected, most with new introductions by
well-known writers. This is the imprint’s twenty-�fth year. A big trade house
wouldn’t touch the vast majority of its titles, but New York Review Books
�nds its readers. There is no publisher quite like it.
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“Stranger Than Fiction” is not a survey, which is good, since surveys can be
�re hoses of names and dates that barely register and are quickly forgotten,
and it is not a work of critical revisionism, which is O.K., since it allows
Frank to ignore the secondary literature. Which he does. He rejects the term
“modernism” as “overused”; the word “postmodernist” does not appear once.
His book is an exercise in what he calls “descriptive criticism,” and
“descriptive” is a pretty accurate descriptor. Frank explains what is happening
in the books—thirty-one in all, by thirty writers—that he has selected to
represent “the twentieth-century novel.”
“P lot summary” is the dismissive term academics use for this kind of
criticism, but it is actually not that easy, �rst, to see accurately
everything that is going on in a text and, second, to distill it in a form that
can be both sympathetic to the writer’s intentions and critical of the result. A
lot of Edmund Wilson’s criticism was plot summary in this sense. Wilson
just had a brighter �ashlight than the rest of us. He could see things most
readers cannot. There is enough biographical information in Frank’s book to
give us a sense of who the writers were and the worlds they inhabited.
Historical context is mostly broad-brush (the First World War, the
Holocaust). “Stranger Than Fiction” is chie�y about �ction.
Frank is interested, as literature professors generally are not, in the feel of
certain books and writers, and he is adept at capsule characterizations. Henry
Green “has the gift of falling asleep at the start of a sentence and waking up
in some entirely other place without batting an eyelid.” The prose of the
Russian writer Vasily Grossman is “as simple as an outstretched hand.” W.
G. Sebald writes in a “soft-shoe, rather priestly way.” Colette “takes a cat’s
view of human life.”
Frank calls “The Man Without Qualities” “the world’s longest feuilleton, a
philosophical digression, a pilgrim’s progress.” He describes Thomas Mann’s
“The Magic Mountain” as “at once a monument and a caprice . . . an
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immense book that is also in a sense an empty book.” D. H. Lawrence could
seem “a sort of ventriloquist’s doll, perched on the century’s knee.” Elsa
Morante’s “History: A Novel” is “openhanded and trouble-hearted and a
little out of control.” Ernest Hemingway’s prose: “Writing like that is as
much as anything about writing like that.”
Frank says that he has chosen to write about books he likes—“books that
move me”—and the books he likes are typically books that, although they
may be easy to admire, are not really all that easy to like. There are
exceptions. Colette’s “Claudine at School” has to be one of the funniest
books ever written. “Lolita” is funny in bits, and seductively narrated, which
is, as Frank says, Nabokov’s intention, to implicate us in the self-
justi�cations of a child abuser. Grossman’s Tolstoyan novel about the Battle
of Stalingrad, “Life and Fate,” is—I don’t know a better word—powerful.
But “Life: A User’s Manual,” a six-hundred-and-sixty-page anatomy of a
Paris apartment building which describes in exhaustive detail its occupants,
their apartments, their multigenerational backstories, and every piece of
furniture and bric-a-brac they possess is not exactly beach reading. Frank’s
unpacking of that novel, on the other hand, is one of the best things in his
book.
Seven of Frank’s thirty-one novels are by women. Three of the novels are
from Latin America, one is African (Chinua Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart”),
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and one is Japanese (“Kokoro,” by Natsume Sōseki). Only four novelists are
from the United States, and they don’t include William Faulkner or John
Dos Passos, which is an unusual choice since those two had a big in�uence
on not just the American novel but the French novel in the nineteen-thirties
and forties. Faulkner gets a little attention in “Stranger Than Fiction,” Dos
Passos almost none. Of the American novels Frank chooses to write about,
two are by expatriates (Stein and Hemingway), and one is by an émigré
(Nabokov).The fourth American novelist is Ralph Ellison, and Frank does
devote a chapter to “Invisible Man,” Ellison’s only completed novel.
Although “Naked Lunch,” “Gravity’s Rainbow,” “American Pastoral,” and
“Beloved” make it onto a long list of books in an appendix mysteriously titled
“Other Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel,” postwar American �ction
largely goes missing, Ellison aside. The simple reason is that Frank doesn’t
think much of it. “There was something insular and retardataire about the
postwar American novel,” he writes, “as if it wanted to cast aside the
questions and quandaries of the twentieth-century novel and retrieve and
enjoy the good old authority and amplitude of the nineteenth-century novel
in new and improved form.” Saul Bellow, John Updike, and Norman Mailer
may have been prize-winning best-sellers domestically, he says, but they had
little in�uence on world literature. (Well, Bellow did win a Nobel Prize,
which is surely international recognition of a sort.) In other words, the term
“twentieth-century novel” does not include many well-known novels
published in the twentieth century. So how does a writer make the cut?
F rank’s theory of the novel is a traditional one. It dates back at least to
Stendhal’s de�nition in “The Red and the Black,” from 1830: “A novel
is a mirror carried along a high road. At one moment it re�ects the blue
skies, at another the mud of the puddles at your feet.” The twentieth century
was a period of violent change; therefore, violent change is what the
twentieth-century novel re�ects—not, or not only, in its subject matter but in
its form. When things become disjointed and unreliable, when the world
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turns upside down, so does the novel.
“The writers of the twentieth century are ambushed by history” is how Frank
puts it. “They exist in a world where the dynamic balance between self and
society that the nineteenth-century novel sought to maintain can no longer
be maintained, even as �ction.” The twentieth-century novelist therefore
rejects the “sanctimonious and sentimental and hypocritical” (Frank’s words)
�ction of the nineteenth century. Twentieth-century writers found in the
novel a form that had emerged from the nineteenth century “as a robust
presence with a tenacious worldly curiosity and a certain complacent self-
regard, a form that was both ready to shake things up and asking to be shook
up.” They duly shattered the complacency and shook up the form. The novel
was gut-renovated.
A great deal of this generic refashioning involved stripping the nineteenth-
century novel of its genteel surface, exposing what Frank calls “those realities
of the bedroom and the abattoir that the novel in the nineteenth century had
tended to keep in the background.” This is why Colette makes the cut: she
writes about sex with a �ippancy that (in Frank’s theory) would have made
George Eliot blush. And few writers have ever been as ungenteel as Joyce.
“Ulysses” has frank depictions of defecation, urination, masturbation,
menstruation, �atulence, eructation, and rhinotillexis (nose-picking).
Virginia Woolf found the book vulgar. She had to force herself to read it—
and then, in “Mrs. Dalloway,” another of Frank’s thirty-one, she borrowed
many of Joyce’s techniques. (Mrs. Dalloway does not pick her nose, though,
at least not on camera.)
The rejection of nineteenth-century sanctimony and hypocrisy is why Frank’s
list includes André Gide’s “The Immoralist” and Jean Rhys’s “Good
Morning, Midnight”—unpleasant stories narrated by unpleasant people. The
twentieth-century novel is not out to please. It is “an exploding form in an
exploding world.”
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O f course, there is another way of looking at all this. If we drop the
mirror metaphor, we can describe the history Frank is tracing as the
emergence of the art novel. Around 1900, writers began experimenting with
the formal properties of their medium, something that painters, sculptors,
composers, choreographers, and even artists in a brand-new medium,
cinema, were doing at the same time.
What is striking about this period of lively artistic change in Europe and the
United States is that it does not seem to have been a response to world
events. It may be intuitive to associate movements that undermine traditional
conceptions of how a novel should read or what a painting should look like
with traumatic change, but we are much more likely to see artistic risk-taking
when times are good than when they are bad. New art needs a cultural
infrastructure—publishers, gallerists, 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 those
agents when the bombs are falling.
Because of books like Paul Fussell’s “The Great War and Modern Memory”
(1975), twentieth-century styles in art and literature are often explained as
responses to the rupture in Western self-consciousness created by the First
World War. The war was a traumatic event in both Europe and the United
States, and it led people to wonder whether they had really understood the
apparently tranquil and prosperous North Atlantic world that preceded it.
“The tide that bore us along,” Henry James wrote in a letter to a friend ten
days after �ghting broke out, “was then all the while moving to this as its
grand Niagara. . . . It seems to me to undo everything, everything that was
ours, in the most horrible retroactive way.”
But the war had nothing to do with the new art, because formal innovation
was well under way before August, 1914. Alfred Jarry’s play “Ubu Roi” was
�rst performed in 1896, the same year that the French director Georges
Méliès began experimenting with the properties of �lm. “Claudine at
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School” came out in 1900, “The Immoralist” in 1902. Picasso painted “Les
Demoiselles d’Avignon” in 1907. One of Arnold Schoenberg’s �rst atonal
compositions, “Three Piano Pieces,” was written in 1909.
Gertrude Stein wrote “The Making of Americans,” among her most
ambitious and radical texts, between 1903 and 1911. T. S. Eliot �nished
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in 1911. Marcel Duchamp painted
“Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2” in 1912. Vaslav Nijinsky’s “Afternoon
of a Faun” premièred in 1912. “Swann’s Way,” the �rst volume of “In Search
of Lost Time,” was published in 1913, the year Igor Stravinsky’s “The Rite
of Spring” had its début. Joyce began “Ulysses,” Franz Kafka began “The
Trial,” and Stein published “Tender Buttons” in 1914. Almost all the
modern “isms”—Cubism, Post-Impressionism, Futurism, Imagism,
Vorticism, Symbolism, naturalism, and stream of consciousness, too—
preceded the war. The �rst English use of “avant-garde” in the arts was in
1910. The spirit of Frank’s “twentieth-century novel” had its origins in
peacetime.
When the war came, those innovations found new uses, but a cultural
infrastructure to sustain them was largely in place. Hemingway’s “In Our
Time” re�ects the experience of war, and it is one of the books Frank
discusses. But Hemingway got his prose style, in part, from writing that
Gertrude Stein had done before the war began.
It’s not that the art novel lacked ambition or was intended for a coterie
audience. Frank thinks that the mission Watt ascribed to the eighteenth-
century novel, to make “a full and authentic report of human experience,” did
not change. It just got problematized. After 1914, history seemed more
uncertain, surfaces more deceiving, and the conventions of novelistic
storytelling had become obsolete. “A sense of the novel as both mattering
immensely, as being a crucial way of getting certain things right, but also
being misbegotten, inspires and haunts the novelists of this book,” Frank
says. “The problem of approaching the problem always lurks in the
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background.” By modernizing itself, the novel preserved its cultural
relevance.
It didn’t last. Frank thinks that the novel ran out of currency thirty years ago.
Novelists, in his view, are no longer pushing the envelope. I’m not sure that’s
so. What does seem true, though, is that the novel is no longer at the center
of the cultural conversation. People don’t ask today, “What are you reading?”
They ask, “What are you streaming?” The television series is the middle-
class entertainment medium of the twenty-�rst century. Or maybe it was,
since people are already writing about the end of a golden age of television
that began with shows like “The Sopranos” and “The Wire.”
Has prestige television changed the novel? Many nineteenth-century novels
enjoyed a second life in the twentieth century as �lm adaptations. Henry
James would, one hopes, be grati�ed to know that “The Portrait of a Lady”
has been adapted as a miniseries, on the BBC, and as a feature �lm, directed
by Jane Campion, plus a television version in Urdu—all together almost
surely attracting a much bigger audience than the print edition.
Today, a novelist can hardly avoid fantasizing about the home-viewing
market. And that market now includes not only popular writers like
George R. R. Martin (“Game of Thrones”) and Mick Herron (“Slow
Horses”), but authors of art novels, such as Elena Ferrante (“My Brilliant
Friend”), Margaret Atwood (“The Handmaid’s Tale”), Sally Rooney
(“Normal People,” “Conversations with Friends”), Colson Whitehead
(“Underground Railroad”), and Patricia Highsmith (the “Ripley” books). Do
�ction writers today design their stories to work well onscreen? The series
themselves sometimes exhibit a fairly high degree of artfulness. Steve
Zaillian’s “Ripley” is to “L.A. Law” as Virginia Woolf is to Charles Dickens.
We may watch these shows relatively mindlessly, between dinner and bed,
but that is how people read Dickens and Balzac in the nineteenth century.
No one thought, Someday, there will be a Norton Critical Edition of “Oliver
Twist.” But now there is. After this century is over, maybe an imaginative
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critic like Edwin Frank will cherry-pick the best of the television shows and
write a book about them. Could be a genre. ♦
Published in the print edition of the November 18, 2024, issue, with the headline
“New Chapter.”
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Yorker.
Louis Menand is a staff writer at The New Yorker. His books include “The Free World:
Art and Thought in the Cold War,” released in 2021, and “The Metaphysical Club,”
which was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for history.
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