Is the Twentieth-Century Novel a Genre?

Genres 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 definition 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 fiction—could be charted on graphs. He founded the Stanford Literary Lab to undertake this kind of quantitative 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 inflection point in the history of civilization.

In 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 first writers to insist on fiction 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 influential treatment of the genre. “The novel is the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God” was his memorable definition. 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 definition 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, 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 profitable to talk about the twentieth-century novel as something different from the nineteenth-century novel or, for that matter, from the twenty-first-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-fifth year. A big trade house wouldn’t touch the vast majority of its titles, but New York Review Books finds its readers. There is no publisher quite like it.

“Stranger Than Fiction” is not a survey, which is good, since surveys can be fire 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.”

“Plot summary” is the dismissive term academics use for this kind of criticism, but it is actually not that easy, first, 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 flashlight 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 chiefly about fiction.

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 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-justifications 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”), 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 influence 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.