Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel
A rattling heritage railway train of history and criticism by Edwin Frank that seems especially attractive at this post-election moment, when many are worried that America is about to run right off the tracks ... One closes the rousing and fully committed Stranger Than Fiction not really closing it — which I think is Frank’s intention — but feeling hunger for a big new novel that confronts today’s America.
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In [Frank's] view, the twentieth-century novel is a distinct literary genre, and his book is an ambitious, intelligent, and happily unpretentious effort to map it ... Imaginative.
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The book is a hopscotch through masterworks, consistently pleasurable and often riveting, as literary history goes ... Frank has a story to tell, one that is neither exactly a progress nor a rise and fall. Instead, we read of energies gathered, innovations achieved, consolidations accomplished. There are fascinating and unexpected pairings.
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