Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel

by Edwin Frank

A legendary editor’s survey of the twentieth-century novel and how it shaped the fiction of the future

'Edwin Frank’s masterly account of the novel gone modern and the modern gone global is a critical history of the last literary century. Epic, personal, smart, wise, witty' JOSHUA COHEN

'Stranger Than Fiction sizzles with passion as it tracks the contortions of a volatile form in a volatile time' TOM McCARTHY

'Living as we do in a world where book culture is on the decline, Stranger Than Fiction comes as a comfort, a solace and a revelation: a wealth of remarkable writing about even more remarkable writing' VIVIAN GORNICK

For more than two decades, Edwin Frank has introduced readers to forgotten or overlooked texts as director of the acclaimed publisher New York Review Books. In Stranger than Fiction, he offers a legendary editor’s survey of the key works that defined the twentieth-century novel.

Starting with Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, Frank shows how its twitchy, self-undermining narrator established a voice that would echo through the coming century. He illuminates Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway’s reinvention of the American sentence; Colette and André Gide’s subversions of traditional gender roles; and the monumental ambitions of works such as Mrs Dalloway, The Magic Mountain and The Man Without Qualities to encompass their times. Also included are Japan's Natsume Soseki and Nigeria’s Chinua Achebe, as well as Vasily Grossman, Hans Erich Nossack and Elsa Morante. Later chapters range from Ralph Ellison and Marguerite Yourcenar to Gabriel García Márquez and WG Sebald.

Frank makes sense of the century by mixing biographical portraiture, cultural history and close encounters with great works of art. In so doing he renews our appreciation of the paradigmatic art form of our times.

Genres: Nonfiction, Literary Criticism, History, Books About Books, Essays, Literature, Writing

454 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2024

Reviews

[Paul Bryant · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a worthy chunk of brainy typing. It was the opposite of what I was hoping it would be (a survey of the 20th century novel). It kind of worries me that I seem to be the only person not rhapsodising about it. What Edwin Frank means by The Twentieth Century Novel is mostly the thumping big high-toned literary novel. We’re in for a trudge up and down the Himalayas of Greatness. So you can predict the books that get full attention :

The Magic Mountain – Tommy Mann
Ulysses – Jimmy Joyce
The Man without Qualities – Bob Musil
In Search of Lost Time – Marcella Proust
One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabe Marquez

And 28 other mostly mighty slabs. So sit up straight you at the back, no talking, this is serious stuff. If it’s 500 pages long and features swathes of ruminations by a philosophically inclined man then yes, it’s in. OK there are a couple of easy ones, The Island of Doctor Moreau and Claudine at School. But that’s it.

Altogether, 33 books get looked at, six are by women, the latest one is The Enigma of Arrival by VS Naipaul, published in 1987. There’s no Bellow, Roth, Rushdie, Gass, Gaddis or Pynchon. But still this is not a bad 33 books – I would have left out The Immoralist and Amerika and Life and Fate and would have substituted Journey to the End of Night, The 42nd Parallel and At Swim-Two-Birds (something a bit weird and wonderful as a relief from all this earnestness).

One thing that bugged me - he rarely dislikes anything. Here he is wondering about Gertrude Stein’s style

which – with its limited vocabulary, ever-expanding paratactic sentences, and repetition compulsion – might be dismissed as both flat and flatulent, maddening and even perhaps a bit mad…. It is writing that tends towards a drone, and a drone is perhaps the tone of boredom

But he quickly gives himself a shake and ends up by saying Gertrude Stein “gives language, rather miraculously, a new life”. I have often found it to be true that none of the professors can ever say anything bad about a novel that is part of the Canon of Great Literature, however dull or infuriating it is. I have a theory that if they do they will be kicked out of the Professors Club.

He gets tripped up by Lolita, as many people do

It’s worth considering why Lolita remains controversial. It can’t be because of the story itself – basically a story of an unscrupulous seducer and a wronged woman that is almost as old as story itself.

Wronged woman? Lolita is 12. He continues :

If the book remains scandalous it is because once and for all it interrupts, short-circuits, the connection between ethics and aesthetics that twentieth-century novelists like Wells and Musil…were desperate to affirm.

No, that is not why Lolita is still scandalous. It is about child rape, that is why.

What I didn’t like the most however was the professorial tone and the persistent tendency towards abstraction. Opening it at random, page 233 gives us

Musil participates in his growing novel as incredulously as Ulrich does in the parallel campaign, even as his novel often delights us with a sense that, caught up in appearances as it may be, its transparent factitiousness makes it the perfect (perfectly facetious) instrument for taking the measure of our factitious times.

Or try this

Character and situation, expressed and explored through a reliable interplay of dialogue and description conducted under narrative oversight : that’s the form the novel settled into in the nineteenth century, and which the vast majority of novels take to this day.

😴

Instead of Stranger Than Fiction I would recommend these three books which take you on a thrilling trip through the wonderful world of novels :

13 Ways of Looking At the Novel by Jane Smiley
The Novel : A Biography by Michael Schmidt
A New Literary History of America edited by Greil Marcus

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Character and situation, expressed and explored through a reliable interplay of dialogue and description conducted under narrative over-sight: that's the form the novel settled into in the nineteenth century, and which the vast majority of novels take to this day.
[...]
Ordinary though it may be, the story must still be made to enthrall, and to this end the nineteenth-century novel resorts to plotting, the elaboration, that is, of how the story unfolds until it is fully told.
[...]
None of these things is on offer in Notes from Underground.

Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel is a survey of the form by Edwin Frank, editorial director of the New York Review of Books and of the NYRB Classics series, centred around 30 key texts he has chosen, but with references to many more.

He's careful to set out at the outset what this is not, for example acknowledging that with the exception of Natsume Sōseki's Kokoro, all of the books are from major European languages (that includes Spanish and Portuguese novels written in Latin and Southern America) which, as he says, doesn't represent the spread of the novel through Europe, let alone the rest of the world.

Although, and importantly, this is less anglo-centric than many such surveys published in the UK/US, and translation is, Frank tells us, key to unlocking this survey:

"In translation" was the key, opening the way into the story of the novel, which was, as I suddenly saw it, 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, something the expansive and adaptable form of the novel had from the start been uniquely open to, which the last century had provided the perfect—what?—petri dish in which it could further develop. On one hand, the twentieth century had been a century of staggering transformation-world war, revolution, women voting, empires falling, cities sprawling, expanded life spans and lives cut short, mass media, genocide, the threat of nuclear extinction, civil and human rights, and so on—a century to boggle the mind, which demanded and stretched and beggared description. On the other hand we had the novel, emerging 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. Hadn't the two, as the phrase goes, been made for each other?

The choice of c. 30 novels, and their authors, that he uses to illustrate his concept of a 'twentieth-century novel' (see below) includes some obvious choices, but omits others and includes some perhaps less expected, and he also provides a list of another 80 or so novels he might have included.

The pleasure of Frank's survey is that the reader gains further insight into novels with which they are familiar and is led to others they may not have read, all done in the a coherent outline of the novel's evolution and with reference to many other works.

Frank bookends his survey with two particularly texts which fall outside the strict century. Interestingly, he dates the start of the 20th century form to the beginning of 1864. Fyodor Dostoevsky in in Moscow writing the first twentieth century novel. He doesn't know if, of course. (He never will).

This being Notes from Underground - Frank cites the Roland Wilkes translation but includes new translations from Max Lawton:

Influential twentieth-century novelists, from Proust and Mann to David Foster Wallace, have written about the importance of Dostoevsky to their work, and Notes in particular echoes with uncanny frequency through the novels of the twentieth century. (So much so that I suspect that many of the echoes are in fact indirect: an echo of an echo.) Consider, in any case: the book introduces an archetype; the anonymous writer of Notes becomes the Underground Man, as much a modern myth, Dostoevsky's American biographer Joseph Frank has rightly said, as Faust, Hamlet, Don Juan, or Sherlock Holmes. The shadow of this mythic character can be detected in the protagonist of Knut Hamsun's Hunger, Jean Rhys's lost women, Gombrowicz's Ferdydurke, Bellow's Dangling Man, Ellison's Invisible Man, and Bernhard's The Loser, among many others.

Frank also explains, as per the quote which opens my review, why Notes from Underground, whose structure resembled nothing so much as a swept-up heap of broken glass was such a departure from the nineteenth century novel, an archiac form but which actually still dominates 21st century writing.

The last 20th century novel he includes is from 1987 - one of the less obvious choices, Naipaul's The Enigma of Arrival: A Novel in Five Sections - deliberately breaking off before the fall of the Berlin Wall which, other than mathematically, perhaps did mark the end of the 20th century.

Rather unimaginitavely he avers that: A prominent critic of classical music recently said to me that in the last thirty years or so there had been to his ear no significant new development in the music, something unheard in all its earlier history. The same could be said of the novel. I can think of plenty of examples that advance the form as much as many of the 20th century works featured here - e.g. novels by Alexis Wright, Isabel Waidner, Jon Fosse, Han Kang, Jon McGregor, Louise Bennett, Marilyyne Robinson, Jen Craig, Ali Smith, Benjamín Labatut, Knausgaard, Olga Tokarczuk, Rachel Cusk and Simon Okotie amongst others. It may rather be truer to say that the 21st century is still nascent and it's too early to define a new form. Also that the best novels of the century, given the delays in translation, may still be unavailable to anglophones.

But he does coinclude Time flies; the novel hangs on. Is there a writer who captures something of this post-twentieth century mixture of blur and stasis? Perhaps WG Sebald, writing at the end of the last century, counts as the first writer of our digitalised and disrupted age, featuring WG Sebald's final novel, Austerlitz - in 2001 the novel was published in German, translated by Anthea Bell into English, and in December the author died in a car accident. I would echo Frank's view as to how it caps the century and ushers in the next (he chooses Austerlitz as the one of Sebald's work most obviously meeting our expectations of a novel):

Sebald's voice has a complex literary pedigree: if it hearkens back to Gide in conception, the tone is closer to the meandering musings of Robert Walser, even as the layering of reported narratives recalls Conrad's Marlow and the novels of Faulkner (who was influenced by Conrad) and, more recently, Claude Simon (influenced by Faulkner) and Thomas Bernhard.

The overall effect, however, puts me in mind of a line by the poet Paul Celan, whose work Sebald undoubtedly knew: "Niemandes Stimme, wieder" ("No one's voice, again"). Sebald's fiction, a chorus of voices and a compound of genres from the journal to the travelogue to the literary essay, at once fiction and nonfiction, as memory is, resembles the many messages in myriad languages that you might pick up on a shortwave radio in mid ocean. A crossed signal, charged with the lost voices of the past century and centuries past but also with intimations of the infinite memory machine that in the 1990s had begun to shape the future.

I couldn't help but notice the one common link in these two lists of authors influenced by Notes from the Underground and influencing Sebald - Thomas Bernhard, for me the most important novelist of the mid second half of the century (1964-1989), although he doesn't play a particularly prominent role in Frank's account.

A fascinating survey and brilliantly written.

Key books featured

Prologue: Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Island of Doctor Moreau by HG Wells
The Immoralist by André Gide
The Other Side by Alfred Kubin
Amerika by Franz Kafka
Claudine at School by Colette
Kim by Rudyard Kipling
Three Lives by Gertude Strein
The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas by Machado de Assis
Kokoro by Natsume Sōseki
The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
Ulysses by James Joyce
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway
The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil
Confessions of Zeno by Italo Svevo
Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys
Sons and Lovers and The Rainbow by D.H. Lawrence
The End: Hamburg 1943 by Hans Erich Nossack
Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman
Artemisia by Anna Banti
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
The Lost Steps by Alejo Carpentier
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
Life: A User's Manual by Georges Perec
Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar
History by Elsa Morante
The Enigma of Arrival by V.S. Naipaul

Epilogue: Austerlitz by WG Sebald

[Nancy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Panoramic and deeply insightful, demonstrating the arc of the novel's development from the Victorian Age through the 20th c,. this book kept me on my toes. I particularly enjoyed the chapters on authors I have read. But I did feel over my head with this one!

[Emily Suchanek · Rating 4 out of 5]

Picture This: In "Stranger Than Fiction," Edwin Frank, renowned for his stewardship at New York Review Books, surveys pivotal twentieth-century novels from Dostoevsky's "Notes from Underground" to works by Stein, Hemingway, Colette, Gide, Woolf, Mann, Musil, Soseki, Achebe, Grossman, Nossack, Morante, Ellison, Yourcenar, García Márquez, and Sebald, offering insightful biographical sketches, cultural contexts, and profound encounters with these influential literary masterpieces, ultimately revitalizing our understanding of the enduring significance of the novel in modern art and culture.


Thoughts: Frank's work isn't an attempt to establish a definitive canon or prescribe literary theory. It defies categorization as a straightforward history, yet its insightful exploration of 20th century fiction unfolds in a captivating, non-condescending manner, akin to a cherished conversation with an intellectually stimulating friend who shares my passion for language and has delved far deeper into understanding literary nuances. While I've only read a fraction of the books discussed by Frank—others await my attention on my shelves—the joy and enlightenment his writing brings transcend familiarity with each text. His erudition and enthusiasm for literature left me exhilarated and enriched, illuminating how writers influence and inspire one another, and why their works resonate so profoundly.

Thank you to NetGalley for the advance copy

[Michael Reilly · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a survey of thirty-three significant literary novels from the twentieth century. Frank starts in 1864 with Dostoevsky's "Notes from Underground", a model for modern serious novelists, and ends with V. S. Naipaul's 1987 "The Enigma of Arrival.".

Each chapter discusses one or two novels. He hits the obvious greatest hits, Proust-"In Search of Lost Time, Joyce-"Ulysses", and Mann-"The Magic Mountain". He pays attention to the big names. Virginia Wolfe, Hemingway, D. H. Lawrence, and Nabokov each get a chapter. He has some surprises. H. G. Wells -"The Island of Doctor Moreau" and George Perec- "Life A User's Manual" are featured. It is a clever cross section of big books from the twentieth century.

Frank's approach to each book reminds me of Edmund Wilson. Like Wilson, he gives us some biography to place the writer in perspective. He decides what a writer is trying to do and judges him by that standard. He gives a good sense of the writing style. He gets across the gist of the book.

Frank is a sophisticated, close and smart reader. He also avoids the jargon and theory-speak that clogs most serious literary criticism, which is another similarity to Edmund Wilson.

Although he does not posit any great overarching theory of the 20th century novel, he does highlight two tendencies.

First, "the stories told by (these novels) are for the most part commonplace...These are not books of marvels, but books about things we know something about". "Ulysses" and "Mrs. Dalloway" are prime examples.

Second, to read these authors is "to catch them in the act of thinking about the novel in the midst of writing a novel." The writers are not just telling a story. They are self-consciously experimenting with how to tell a story.

Joyce and Proust loom over most of these writers. Virginia Wolfe and Hemingway were overtly reacting to Joyce. Proust was a challenge to many of them. Nabokov, for example, admitted to being influence by him

Frank also has some good one liners. "Without Hemingway, no Bogart", which adds a twist to watching "Casablanca"

Ideally, this kind of survey does three things.

First, it confirms your decision not to read certain books. Frank satisfies me that there is no need for me to read "The Magic Mountain" or "Gide's "The Immoralist.

Second, it gives interesting insight into books you have read. His chapters on "Ulysses" and Kipling's "Kim", do that.

Third, it convinces you to read books you have been avoiding. I am going to read Achebe's "Things Fall Apart" and Hemingway's "In Our Time" after reading Frank's discussion of them.

This is a model of intelligent readable literary criticism.

[CatReader · Rating 3 out of 5]

Edwin Frank is an an American writer and editorial director of New York Review Books; his 2024 book Stranger than Fiction reads like a PhD dissertation analyzing around 30 seminal novels (mostly written by male authors who were European or North American, though there are a handful of female authors and authors from other parts of the world included) of the 20th century. The 20th century is defined very loosely, though, as the first books Frank profiles were published in the 19th century - Fyodor Dostoyevsky's 1864 novella Notes from the Underground and H.G. Wells' 1896 novel The Island of Doctor Moreau.

I admit I'm not a big fiction reader (I'm very tempted to count this as my 10th and final obligatory fiction read of the year, but as a purist, I won't), but I have read a good amount of 20th century fiction in academic settings as a prior college English major. Surprisingly (to me), I had not read most of the books profiled here, with the exceptions of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart and Gabriel Garcia Marquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude (which is sadly the only magical realism work Frank profiles in depth), though I have read other works by Dostoevsky, Virginia Woolf, and other writers covered. While I tried my best for the first half of the book, I found myself skimming most of the other chapters as the book continued, as Frank manages to spoil the plots of most of the books while also providing running commentary - so, hard to follow if you haven't read the books already, or plan to at some point and would rather not be spoiled (I'm mostly in the former category).

My statistics:
Book 271 for 2025
Book 2197 cumulatively

[K. E. Creighton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel by Edwin Frank is a book for literature nerds like me who should be forewarned: Do not read this book if you don’t want to have hundreds of books added to your ‘to be read’ pile of books. Honestly, the number of books Frank discusses and mentions in this book is mind-boggling and beyond impressive. So, I would advise readers to only take notes on those books mentioned that really pique their interests lest they take weeks or months to read this book. Unless that’s what they’re after, of course.

First off, I need to say how impressed I am with how thorough yet entertaining this book is. Yes, I’m a self-professed literature nerd. However, there are some truly fascinating tidbits scattered throughout the book that make learning about the twentieth-century novel akin to reading a scandalous tabloid dedicated to the former literati and their struggles, and therefore highly entertaining. While the book is dense, it will have those who are not self-professed literature nerds like me turning pages for the most part, too. And yet, it should still be mentioned and or remembered that the book is only dedicated to the works of a dying, or already dead, literati. Which may not be too much of a shock? Although it does beg the question: What does that mean for the novel now?

The first part of this book is fascinating and Frank is diligent and thorough with the works he covers, including some works by women authors and international authors to the extent that the history of the novel itself allowed, seeing as how at the turn of the twentieth century (as well as throughout) the novel was mostly Eurocentric and dominated by men because Eurocentric men dominated critiquing and publishing circles and therefore the literati and what would be canonized, whether those works were ‘worthy’ of canonization or not. Nonetheless, I wish that same vivacity and thoroughness was brought to the latter half of the twentieth century in this book, as it pertains to the novel’s continued evolution.

I feel as if it is borderline irresponsible (and this book risks being myopic and woefully lacking) not to mention (in detail) works that came from and or are a product and or representation of the Civil Rights and Human Rights eras (which are still playing out), as well as works that detail in full the Feminist Movement (which is still playing out), as well as works that challenge the form and structure of the novel in the wake of mass production of consumer goods and mass media and technology and computing. There is so much that happened in the latter half of the twentieth century that challenged the form and structure of the novel and continues to do so.

I don’t want to clog this review with pages and pages of literary criticism (perhaps I will work on a book one day instead?), so I will simply offer a list of works that challenge the notion that the novel didn’t continue to evolve in the second half of the twentieth century and well into the twenty-first century as a result of the eras and movements mentioned in the previous paragraph—especially when it comes to the concepts of identity, inherited trauma, bodily autonomy and trauma, mental health and trauma, and language influenced by computing technology and the resistance to it and Eurocentric misogynistic capitalistic language and lifestyles and architecture and gazes and perspectives (etc.), as well as acceptance of and resistance to climate change and an impending apocalypse and shifting borders, as well as the inclusion of dual and multiple overlapping timelines and heterogeneous perspectives and distinct voices often spoken at once— much more than what was insinuated in the latter half of Stranger Than Fiction:

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
White Noise by Don DeLillo
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler
Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
American War by Omar El Akkad
Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr
Ring Shout by P. Djèlí Clark
Babel by R.F. Kuang
Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
How Much of These Hills is Gold by C Pam Zhang
The Candy House by Jennifer Egan
Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
Luster by Raven Leilani
Martyr! By Kaveh Akbar
The Last White Man by Mohsin Hamid
Parasol Against the Axe by Helen Oyeyemi
Bright Young Women by Jessica Knoll
Real Americans by Rachel Khong
The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas
Trust by Hernan Diaz
Delirium by Laura Restrepo
The House in the Cerulean Sea by T.J. Klune
All works by Toni Morrison, Louise Erdrich, Anita Roy, Patricia Engel…

It is also worth mentioning that rewriting history via fiction, and averting it or inverting it from a non-Eurocentric heterosexual male perspective is so much more than simply writing historical fiction or a novel that is based in a ‘history’ that has widely been accepted by those in power but may not be complete or fully ‘true’ (consider The Moor’s Account by Laila Lalami, The Book of Longings by Sue Monk Kidd, The Women by Kristin Hannah, novels by Marie Benedict, By Any Other Name by Jodi Picoult, and so on). And that the evolution of fantasy and fantasy worlds in fiction, as well as the romance and romantasy genres, in which there are victors over ‘evil’ and in which ‘evil’ is sometimes complicated or in the eye of the beholder or reader, is also important and valuable to consider (these topics would obviously need their own posts and or books) ...

Yes, I understand that most of the novels on the list above were published in the twenty-first century. Yet they too have precursors from the twentieth century, as most of the novels mentioned in Stranger Than Fiction had precursors from the previous century. Indeed, most of the novels discussed in Stranger Than Fiction were written and conceived in the nineteenth century. So, what are the direct or indirect precursors to the books on the list above that were written in the twentieth century? This will take closer study, surely, but they do hold different and evolved forms and, for lack of a better word at the moment, essences, than novels written in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, though they do hold similarities as well, of course.

Perhaps the literary fiction coming out now is the amalgamation of more than one or two or three centuries worth of novels and their related human-generated upheavals and concerns, as well as newer literary forms that took place and continued to evolve in the latter half of the twentieth century? Either way, the novel is not dead or dying or staying stagnant in form. Not by a long shot. The novel will continue to mirror and stretch the limits of the living humans who write them and read them.

All that being said, Frank was focused on the twentieth-century novel (mostly works that were influenced in some way by WWI and WWII) in Stranger Than Fiction and I applaud this undertaking that was bold and brave and smart and overwhelmingly never-ending because there will always be more to say and add to the matter of those novels that have already been written, as they continue to be read over time and are highly unlikely to disappear in the future.

Another warning: Reading this book will make you feel like you haven’t read enough, and that there is no way you could possibly ever catch up or read enough. There will be plenty of books discussed that you may not yet be aware of, and I encourage you to think of this as a good thing, as a literary adventure of sorts. And I say this as someone who has a master’s degree in English and will never feel as if I have read enough. But if you are along for the ride as you read this book, you will thoroughly enjoy it, and it will prompt you to ask so many questions, which is a great thing. Let’s keep conversations about the novel alive!

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[Anthony Millspaugh · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found my reading to be uneven. Although a prolific reader, so many of the novels referenced I either never heard of before and ergo, never read. I did enjoy how the author tried to weave unfamiliar works with better known titles, but there were many connections that just didn’t entice me to read them.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

I approached this book under the impression that it would be the literary equivalent of Dorian Lynsey's 'Thirty three revolutions per minute'. However, I was left ultimately a little disappointed as, although it uncovered some interesting gems about the development of the novels of the 'greater' 20th century (starting with Dostoyevsky's 'Notes from Underground'), it was ultimately a very dry read which left my eyes drooping at times!
Having said that, the chapters on the aforementioned Dostoyevsky, as well as those on Lawrence, Proust and Marquez were pretty engrossing reads. I suppose it was chapters on those books I was unfamiliar with which I found a bit of a struggle.
One thing I got out of the book was a renewed determination to complete Proust's masterwork and to reread all of DH Lawrence's novels (once I've finished Dickens, of course!)

[Mohammad Anas · Rating 3 out of 5]

[NetGalley Read #6]

3.25 ⭐

Information overload.
It drags, at times, and is full of difficult sentences that might put you off from reading.

The Ambition and Scale of this book is appreciable.
I've discovered a lot of new writers after reading this.

I've not read any of the books that comprise the chapters of this book. In most cases, I've heard of the writers.
In a way, this book gives everything away about the story of a particular book and gives nothing away at the same time. The sentence structure in the some of the chapters is just ludicrous and frustrating at times. A proliferation of commas, semi-colons, and hyphens make the sentences a labour to read. On certain occassions, it feels like reading the ramblings of a mad man.

Despite all that, there are several interesting chapters that are well written and a bit easier to read. They provide great insights into the history of the novel and the writers and their lives. It's just that these are dampened by the arduous chapters that I've described above.

[Peggy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am already constructing my personal class on the 20th century novel with this book as my guide. I’ve read many of the books he writes about but never with attention and perception he brings to them. It will be such a pleasure to pull them from my shelves to reread, and an even greater pleasure to delve into those works I don’t know. I believe his overall goal with this book was fulfilled and while it certainly centers on white males it includes many women and several ethnicities. His list of additional books at the end expands in that.
I am tempted, as will any who read this to say, “But what about ….?” Recognizing the impossibility of the task, I think he did pretty well. I would have included others, but wouldn’t we all? He admits all this before he begins. Reject or accept. I plan to keep reading as long as my life allows me.

[Claire Baxter · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overall I found this disappointing. Overwritten and unclear. Full of run-on sentences that spanned 5 or 6 lines and full-page paragraphs. The chapters about books or authors that I knew were generally interesting but the ones about books I wasn't familiar with didn't draw me in. I'm also still unsure of the supposed common thread bringing everything together that makes up "the twentieth century novel."

[Chris Wharton · Rating 5 out of 5]

The “lives” of the title are 31 novels the author has selected to represent the gestation, birth, and development of “the twentieth-century novel.” “Century” itself is a loose construct in such usages (as it should be); here the story begins with a prologue on Dostoyevsky’s 1860s’ Notes From Underground (and Emily Brontë’s even earlier 1847 Wuthering Heights is included on an appended list of “other” lives of the twentieth-century novel). And the novel’s century ends with V. S. Naipaul’s 1987 The Enigma of Arrival (which chapter is followed by an epilogue on W. G. Sebald’s 2001 Austerlitz as a precursor to the novel’s next life—if there is to be one). Between this beginning and ending, the story divides falls into three phases—Breaking the Vessels: late nineteenth-early twentieth century years up to World War I, when many techniques and innovations of modernism were experimented with and introduced in the arts (including literature); Scattering the Sparks: World War I and postwar years, which gave previously unimagined content for the new art forms to engage; and The Withdrawal: World War II and the postwar decades, which continued with more, new, previously unimagined content as possible subjects for novelistic endeavor and response. Within these phases, it seems each selection presented is notable for its distinctiveness, so that a variety of approaches, styles, contents, angles, etc, are represented without too much repetition across selections, which is good, but necessarily limits the selection to one of a type over possible others (but also makes room for less known significant or representative works, which is also good). For me, this meant of about 100 authors represented in the 23 chapters (including prologue and epilogue) and on the appended list, I had only read about 20 of them (and not necessarily the works covered here): these include the four mentioned above plus Kafka, Joyce, Woolf, Hemingway, Vasily Grossman, Achebe, Nabokov, and Garcia Marquez from the chapters and Conrad, Cather, Nathanael West, Fitzgerald, Orwell, Beckett, Tolkien, Malamud, Baldwin, Duras, Pynchon, Morisson, and Roth. So there are a great many authors covered in the chapters whom I had not read at all, but had more than just name recognition (Wells, Kipling, Stein, Mann, Lawrence, Ellison); had just name recognition (Gide, Proust, Rhys); or had not even name recognition (a dozen). Fortunately all the chapters—whether on authors known to me or not—were readable, personable, and easily approachable (not at all jargony or academic in style) and included useful and interesting biographical details of the authors and their historical and sociocultural settings. So I learned a lot, enjoyably so.

[Jeff Jackson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating insights and connections about an unexpected grouping of 20th Century novels, plus a treasure trove of reading recommendations -- written by the founder of NYRB Classics.

[Kevin Crowe · Rating 3 out of 5]

Edwin Frank is Editorial Director of New York Review Books, so it is hardly surprising that his recently published and extensive "Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel" should be so readable, informed and well researched. He places the genesis of the 20th century novel in the 19th century and in particular in Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky's "Notes From the Underground". He follows this by detailed discussion of 31 writers, concentrating on one work by each writer (with the exception of D. H. Lawrence, where he discusses two novels). He also refers to other works by these writers, provides biographical information, looks at the inspirations behind these works and the influence they had.

Though most of the writers discussed are from Europe (including the UK) and the USA, he does feature a few novels from Latin America, Africa and Asia. The authors discussed range from well known names such as Thomas Mann, Gertrude Stein and Franz Kafka (one of my all time favourite writers) to a few I had never come across, such as Georges Perec and Elsa Morante. The fact that I now want to read some of these unknown writers is a testament to Frank's skill as a literary critic. I really enjoyed this fascinating book.

We can of course argue with his choice of writers. Why no writers from the Scottish Renaissance of the early to mid 20th century (writers like Neil Gunn, Lewis Grassic Gibbon and Naomi Mitchison?) and why no-one from Oceania (writers such as Patrick White, Thomas Kenneally and Keri Hulme)? But these are minor gripes and no matter how many writers he discussed, there would be some others would like to be included. Indeed, in an interview he said that he would have liked a chapter on Joseph Conrad ("Heart of Darkness" etc), but it would have made the book too long.

However, I do have a criticism that is less about individual authors and more about the focus, which is on what we now call the Literary Novel, often contrasted to genre fiction. Literary Fiction, as a category, is a 20th century invention and something that the great novelists of the 19th century would not have recognised. For example, Dickens happily wrote ghost stories and collaborated with crime novelist Wilkie Collins while writing innovative novels like "Bleak House". If they were writing today, Jane Austen would probably be seen as a writer of Romances, Mary Shelley of Horror and much of Robert Louis Stevenson seen as Young Adult; yet all of these writers were so much more than such categories suggest.

Not only is his focus on the Literary Novel, but much of the discussion, particularly in the first two sections, is on the literary movement often referred to as Modernism, a movement I have little time for. Quite Frankly, I find James Joyce almost unreadable, Marcel Proust tedious (and in need of a good editor) and Virginia Woolf an insufferable elitist snob. Woolf eschewed anything that was popular and in particular criticised Arnold Bennett, a novelist who between the 1890s and 1930s wrote over thirty novels as well as short story collections, was immensely popular and, in my view, a far better writer than Woolf. His novels explored the lives of ordinary working people, mainly in the Stoke-On-Trent area.

That Bennett doesn't feature in Frank's work, apart from a mention of Woolf's dislike of him, shows that Frank's work is less about the whole expanse of the 20th novel, and more about experimental works. Nothing wrong with that, but the failure, with one exception (H. G. Wells) to address popular and genre fiction weakens the book.

Nonetheless, this is a very good account that hopefully will lead to a renaissance of interest in some at one time ignored writers.

[Frank B. Farrell · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Stranger Than Fiction, Edwin Frank has a very particular narrative that frames his treatment of fiction in the twentieth century. His section titles refer to features of the Kabbalah such as broken vessels and the withdrawal of God. He uses those notions to ask how writers face, first of all, the breakdown of cultural practices able to reconcile the sphere of the interior self and the demands of the social order, and second, the catastrophic events of two world wars, in which it seemed there was no limit on what humans could do to each other. Frank sees two very different, competing directions of thought and writing that emerge throughout the century. On the one side, there is an acknowledgment that the reconciling cultural practices that the Greco-Roman, Christian- humanist, and Enlightenment traditions promised are empty and illusory. He traces this line of thought from Kafka to Georges Perec, the author of Life A User’s Manual. Here there is an acknowledgment of the presence of unspeakable loss, emptiness, and arbitrariness, and an obsessive operating with failing structures, but also an openness to the sacred, the theological, and the sublimely absent, and a valuing of the ethical over the aesthetic. The overwhelming absence of the present order at least points to an unrepresentable otherness.

The other direction that writing takes, on Frank’s narrative, is that of the secular individual voice answerable only to itself. Individual subjectivity is heroic, tragic, and lyrical, with the aesthetic taking precedence over the ethical, and with a relation to a sacred theological sphere vanishing. Frank associates this line of development especially with Gide, Hemingway, Woolf, and Nabokov. Unlike writers such as Kafka and Perec, who acknowledge fully the impossibility today of reconciliation and wholeness in the thoroughly broken world spoken of by the Kabbalah, writers in this second tradition still hope to find in their works versions of compelling wholeness and convincing rightness that derive from their aesthetic powers rather than from a relation to anything theological. Frank discusses Joyce, Mann, and Proust in such terms, clearly seeing them as inferior in this respect to Kafka and Perec.

His narrative is so devoted to pressing the Kafka-to-Perec line, and so committed to denigrating its narrative opponent, that he offers extremely crude, reductive, and unconvincing accounts of many of the great works of the century. He seems unable to recognize the enormously valuable psychological and aesthetic resources provided by the “individual lyrical subjectivity” line of development as we reflect on how we might make it through the pressures of contemporary life. His willingness to reduce some of the richest psychological writing of the century quite often to an amoral selfishness that he claims is complicit in the great catastrophic crimes of the century shows a peculiar blindness in a literary editor. One is reminded of how Marxists have consistently underplayed the resources and virtues of liberal democracies and of the humanist tradition, as they wish to use a picture of thorough brokenness as an incentive for a radically different utopian order.

You can read my longer review at the link below:
https://frankbfarrell.substack.com/p/...

[Edward · Rating 4 out of 5]

Edwin Frank, a New York Review of Books editor, assembles and discusses a list of 32 novels of the 20th century that he finds significant. He divides the 20th century into three personally impressionistic periods, “Breaking the Vessels,” “A Scattering of Sparks,” and “The Withdrawal,” roughly corresponding to experimentation in the novel, reactions to World War I, and a grimly realistic view of the later century. But these are loose categories and overlap with novels reflecting and mirroring influences of other novels and to read this book is hugely rewarding as so much of it is a product of a discriminating and creative mind, and it’s almost enjoyable in a fiction-like way to see where Frank is taking you as he navigates his way through the century.

Frank begins with Dostoevsky’s NOTES FROM THE UNDERGROUND, and while it appeared in the l860’s, it is a key to 20th century novels. It has a character, hard to pin down, who talks about philosophy, literature, politics, progress, and in the end, all aspects of life. He is often detached and self-critical, though, of what he talks about. His voice is “supremely equivocal and not just unreliable, radically unreliable. But real. This is the voice of the 20th century novel.” These novels are off shoots of Dostoevsky, throwing a long fictional shadow forward.

One thing I appreciated in reading Frank’s discussion of these books is the inclusion of details of their lives, giving texture to the novels and making them more interesting, especially as some of the novelists knew other personally as well as through their works. The novels are by such well-known writers as Joyce, Mann, Woolf, Hemingway, Lawrence, Nabokov, Faulkner, Ellison and Naipaul as well as lesser known writers such as Wells and Kipling. Frank ranges across both novels written in English, as well as European writers such as Musil, Perec, Gide, Kafka, Grossman,, and Sebald. Included, too, are African writers particularly Achebe. Latin writers like Marquez, several Asian writers, and he closes with W. G. Sebald who at the beginning of the 21st century with his anticipates the graphic novel with his inclusion of photographs.

In many of these writers’ novels, a good example being V. S. Naipaul’s 1987 ENIGMA OF ARRIVAL there is a “hunger for a higher meaning that the world itself seems helpless to provide.” There seemed a brief period of hopefulness that came with the collapse of Soviet communism, but with the advent of the 21st century and its grim realities of climate change, poverty, wars, there is more than ever that hunger for higher meaning found in 20th century novels.

I think Frank does well in one of his interesting generalizations that tries grasp the 20th century novel, “. . . a defining feature of the 20th century from the start: it has been on a mission to find out what it is, to show itself for what it is, and to tell all t he world, and that this is important, all important, a matter of life and death.”

[Chris Jaffe · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars, but I'm rounding down because I'm not really sure I will retain much of it in a few months.

This is an attempt to explore how the novel changed and transformed in the 20th century. Frank notes it's maybe the main artistic type of the 19th century, when novels were fully established, and focused on plot and characters. Key shifts in writing in the 20th century were movements away from the shackles of plot and characters. He identifies Dostoevskey's "Notes from the Underground" as the first 20th century novel, nevermind that it came out in the mid-19th century, as that didn't have a normal plot or character. Surely the Underground Man is a character and he eventually tells a story, but so much of it is the man's rambling rant where you only eventually slide into a plot, and only learn about the character through his rant.

Later on we get early sci-fi with H.G. Wells, stream-of-conscious writing with James Joyce, magical realism with Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the rise of world literature, and various other things. This clued me into several interesting books that I was unfamiliar with - and that makes me want to kick it up to four stars.

But I'll leave it as three because talk of what makes a 20th century novel seems a bit flimsy. What makes a novel original or new -- well, somethings feel pretty obvious, like Ulysses, but what Frank considers innovative or not feels a bit random. This is especially true as he notes in the epilogue that there's been (in his opinion) little innovation over the last 30 years. Does that tell us more of novels of more of Frank's perpsective? Even if whole new styles of writing haven't emerged, just what types of stories are out there -- well, trends always exist, and a lot of books he covered in this book really tell us more about literary trends than anything. He notes how Sally Rooney's "Normal People" could've been written in the time of Jane Austen, but you could also counter that her writing is part of 21st century displeasure with "Late Capitalism" (as Rooney herself is a supporter of communism). Frank seems like a guy far more at home with books written before he was born than with anything that's happened since then. And that holds true for this book, which is two-thirds the way done before WWII occurs. An appendix at the end lists about 70 additional books, only ten come from the last third of the 20th century.

The book works better as a study of some novels more than any sweeping statement of novels.

[Mattschratz · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had a very complicated kind of feeling when I was reading this book and reading the chapter on The Magic Mountain in particular. Now. I like old books. I like The Magic Mountain. I thought it was good. I also feel somehow--in a way that I have trouble articulating--that the time for reading and appreciating The Magic Mountain has come and gone. I do not feel this way about other old books and it is not obvious to me what separates Ulysses, say, or Cane by Jean Toomer, or Ovid's Metamorphoses, for that matter, from The Magic Mountain; but something about Mann's non-ironized universalism (maybe that's it?) snags, for me. And yet, I am not opposed to universalism! So I need to keep thinking about this.

One thing that I think about when I keep thinking about this is the image of me, the young Matthew, reading a book very similar to Frank's, except it was by Harold Bloom. I wrote a poem about Harold Bloom's The Map of Misreading once, which is included in my most-liked Goodreads review. But I read THE GOOD BOOKS or whatever by Harold (it was actually How to Read and Why), and he loves The Magic Mountain. He goes in on Naptha and Settembrini and the stakes of their arguments for poor Hans, and what a babe Clavdia Chauchat is. I am reading this book on a bench in Central Park in 2007. It is only the fourth time I've been to New York. The whole world is in front of me, and it seems as if I were lucky, the whole world could look like whatever Bloom is claiming that Mann is writing about.

I like my life a lot, and I certainly like my life more than I did in 2007. I guess the thing I have to keep thinking about is whether or not the different shape of my actual, nice life now, and the particular thing I imagined when I learned about Bloom's version of The Magic Mountain--and that I kept thinking of when I read Frank's book--have anything really to do with Mann or Hans or Clavdia Chauchat. Frank's book, now that I mention it here in my review of it, is perfectly fine, noting some nifty trends in one version of a form of the 20th century novel. In his chapter about Natsumi Soseki's Kokoro, he talks about I Am a Cat in a way that led me to talk about it a great deal; my wife could not find I Am a Cat at the bookstore and got Kokoro instead, a pleasing coincidence.

[Mark Lisac · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rather wordy and occasionally caught in a haze of Frank's highly individual musings, which seems an odd outcome for a book by an editor. But then, Frank has strong credentials as an editor so a number of the chapters are worth the effort. He has read widely and deeply and thoughtfully. He also apparently wanted to set down as many of his thoughts as possible. The result for me was a feeling that for every useful perception, or even revelation, there were at least two assertions that sounded idiosyncratic or open to argument or awfully subtle.
A book about a subject as broad as the 20th century novel inevitably raises questions about what was left out. Why, for example, devote a chapter to Gertrude Stein and only a passing reference to Mark Twain and his novel Huckleberry Finn? And what would Frank have to say about Stephen Crane or Jack London as precursors, if in fact there is any reason to call them that?
However, what is strikingly in short supply are novels dealing in the subject of class. Frank is clearly aware of the subject. His epilogue refers to the late 20th century as a time of rising inequality. But the book sparks a suspicion that, for American writers now, any serious mention of class issues is dangerous ground, best avoided. So we get a lot of books dealing with sex, some dealing with race, others dealing with individuality. But when Emile Zola gets a brief mention it's for Nana and his role in the Dreyfus affair, not Germinal. Ralph Ellison deservedly gets a chapter for Invisible Man and William Faulkner is mentioned for grappling with the legacy of slavery. But Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy is included only in an appendix listing notable novels that have gone unmentioned. And there is no sign of Upton Sinclair, John Steinbeck, Erskine Caldwell, or James Jones, just to recall a few at random. Frank might possibly have seen these authors and books as not influential enough to include, but their absence is at least noticeable.

[Benjamin Duchek · Rating 2 out of 5]

Nothing says the lives of the twentieth-century novel like beginning in the mid 19th century. I'll give author Edwin Frank a ton of grace here because the book is beautifully written about gorgeous literature. It's like some guy complaining about the weather, and you look outside: it's 70 degrees and sunny. What's the problem?

Good nonfiction writing is supposed to be easy. One may be writing about complex novels, but there's no need to practice their complexity. Tell me what you're going to tell me, tell me, recap what you told me. Frank doesn't follow that simple hymn at all -- he gives the reader limited threads between the books he chooses to highlight and hardly any larger context about the state of the twentieth-century novel.

If you asked me to explain from this book what Frank thinks that is, I could give you books -- "Lolita", "Magic Mountain" he cited -- and I could give you authors, but no greater thesis. And even then, I have to be careful because some of the books are from the 19th century. It is clear that Frank enjoyed writing this book and the topics he chose. I like TC Boyle's writing and the dry wit of The Economist -- we don't need a book about it. This would have benefited from a tighter focus.

One constant throughout all of literature is that an author enamored with their writing needs an editor. We know that already. Don't get any ideas, Edwin.

[♑︎♑︎♑︎ ♑︎♑︎♑︎ · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm so grateful to Edwin Frank for writing this book. And I'm grateful to Alex Ross, in a way, too, for writing his book about 20th century music--a book I also loved--and that Frank cites in the opening pages of Stranger than Fiction as giving him the template he needed to write his book about 20th century fiction. This book isn't a stab at creating a canon; it isn't prescriptive; it isn't trying to build a theory of literature. It isn't even a history, per se, although it covers a certain time period in a sometime-chronological manner. What it is: Amazing. Never condescending, never pandering. It's like a conversation with the friend I always wanted to know, the one who loves language as much as I do and who has thought a great deal more than I have, though, about how literary language works. I've only read about 1/3 of the books discussed here by Frank (maybe another 1/3 are in my bookshelves, aspirationally acquired, and waiting for me to pick them up one day), but it didn't matter that I hadn't read every book Frank wants to tell me more about, because everything he wrote about every book made me understand better why literature is meaningful, and how writers learn from one another, and how their works relate to and enrich one another. I loved the erudition. This book exhilarated me.

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

While this is definitely a niche product, fans of literary criticism and the 20th century novel will eat this up. Rather than being comprehensive, Edwin Frank has chosen to dive deep into about 30 or so novels that span the century, choosing some of the usual suspects (e.g Thomas Mann, Proust, Joyce, Nabokov, D. H Lawrence, Woolf), while also pointing out plenty of unusual novels that I had never hear of. Normally, I don't like reading literary criticism about things I haven't read, but Frank's blend of biographical and historical context, plot description, and astute critical views made those titles especially interesting. I look forward to reading some of these titles in the future.

I'm giving this five stars, even though I felt the last section on the postwar period ran out of steam. I am simply not sure if it's the author or the reader who ran out of steam, especially since I read much of that portion while doom scrolling on election night 2024.

Thanks to FSG and netgalley for providing a copy for early review.

[S Kellie · Rating 5 out of 5]

The chapters of this book explore authors and their select works within the context of original and intriguing themes. There are many brilliant passages and endless insights, and Edwin Frank shows a profound and broad understanding of his material. Each chapter contains much more historical, biographical and social context than I anticipated, but that was a particularly enjoyable aspect of the readings for me. I particularly enjoyed the chapters on Woolf, DH Lawrence, and Gertrude Stein. Some of the authors were unknown to me, and those chapters, though interesting, took me several days to read through. I would recommend this book to anyone who loves literature and is looking for a deeper understanding of the story of literature itself over the last century and a half.
Thank you to NetGalley for the advanced copy.

[Erika · Rating 4 out of 5]

If there is anything to be understood from this book, it is that the twentieth century novel is compelling, singularly voiced [like many of the authors], unabashedly confused, and determinedly aimless. Perhaps, the most outstanding aspect of these, often not connected, novels is that at no point in history did the intersection of the personal life and the written word become so inextricably intertwined.

Many wonderful sentiments are portrayed and illuminated in this book (in an individual reading of each chapter), but similar to the books that are contained within, "making meaning" is at the forefront of intent in this book, but ultimately, there was little meaning to glean except the passage of time.

[Mandy · Rating 5 out of 5]

A personal retrospective look at the key works of fiction that have defined the 20th century. And being a personal choice there’s plenty of scope here to quibble at the choices, or even object to some of them. But that’s half the fun of a book like this – a lot of “whataboutery”. And if you like lists – like me – then you will soon find yourself compiling one from the list of suggested titles. Although it is a personal selection, it’s nevertheless a balanced, insightful and illuminating one, always well argued, and a perceptive critique of the chosen books. A book to be dipped in and out of, one to delight or irritate, but always to provoke thought.

[Mary Daniels · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is both a mammoth undertaking and an admirable accomplishment. It combines literary criticism, cultural history, biographical information, and personal appreciation into an easily readable format seldom seen in recent literary discussion. I have two quibbles: (1) Frank's sometimes overly convoluted compound-complex sentences occasionally cloud the logic of his argument, and (2) the ending feels weak; it just sort of peters out, but that may be because time marches on despite the author's intention of herding it into centuries.

[Kate Reads · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think I was expecting more or something different here. What I got was over 400 pages of book reports - don't get me wrong. They were very well crafted and deeply thoughtful book reports. And in the beginning I thought we were going to somehow connect these throughout the 20th century. There were themes in the different chapters, some of which held my attention more than others. But I could not wait to get to the Epilogue. I was certain that would tie up all of the themes and leave me with a beautiful package wrapped with a bow. Alas, it was just another book report.

[Justin Evans · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was going to say four stars, and then I realized the only thing seriously wrong with this book is the title, which is daft.

Frank and I have our disagreements, but if we didn't, I would have written the book, and it would have been worse. This is about as good as literary criticism gets this century. It's about the books, and the authors, not about Frank. It's broad(ish). It's occasionally quirky, but not pointlessly revisionist.

But it also ends with Sebald, so I downgrade it to one star.

[Sam Grisham · Rating 5 out of 5]

I picked this up on a whim, not realizing that the author is a famous editor of a New York press. Wow! The type of book I wish I had read in high school to have better appreciation for the history of literature and how novels work. This book is such a craft of analysis and story telling. Five stars.