Done in by Time

Unlike science, the history of art is not a story of progress. Instead, art—all the arts: literature, music, painting, and sculpture—has high and low periods of varying lengths. Just now, for example, in the realm of high art, we are going through a low period. If you doubt this, ask yourself the work of which contemporary novelist, poet, composer, or painter you are eagerly awaiting. I’ll pause here a moment while you fail to find any.

Various reasons have been put forth to explain the current low state into which the arts have fallen. In literature, the dominance of digital culture is cited prominently among them: the computer, the tablet, the cell phone, all of which encourage a shortened attention span, a scroll-down outlook on life. Publishers have also been blamed. The big five American publishing conglomerates—Penguin Random House, Hachette, Macmillan, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster—are said no longer to be interested in publishing what goes by the name of “literary fiction” but is really serious fiction, finding it commercially too risky. Of late there even has been talk of novels being produced to a surefire commercial formula by artificial intelligence.

Then there are periods in which certain literary forms or modes dominate. In classical antiquity we had the epic, the drama, the satire. Drama dominated the Renaissance, and poetry came into its own early in the nineteenth century. “To become a poet of the first rank, great talent is not enough,” W. H. Auden declared. “One must also get born at the right time and in the right place.” He believed the right time was between 1870 and 1890, a period of great ferment in the arts generally. Auden was born in 1907. The nineteenth century was also the great age of the novel in Russia, England, and France.

In Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel, Edwin Frank, a man of wide literary learning who is the editorial director of New York Review Books and founder of the distinguished N.Y.R.B. Classics series, takes up the fate of the novel in the twentieth century. I say the “fate” because the destiny of books, like that of people, is subject to the conditions in which the books come into being. The twentieth century, with its world wars, its adamant ideologies, its mass murders, was more than tumultuous. It was, as Frank notes, “a century of staggering transformation.” The effect on the novel, that literary form whose subject, to cite the title of Anthony Trollope’s novel, is The Way We Live Now, could not be other than radical. Stranger Than Fiction is “the story of an exploding form in an exploding world.”

The book is also, as its author notes in his introduction, “an essay in literary history, a work of descriptive criticism.” In twenty-one chapters he takes up the work of thirty-two novelists. Among novelists who wrote important criticism of the novel, he is most taken with Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and D. H. Lawrence. He makes no claims for completeness, and at the close of his book, he lists seventy-one other writers and novels that, given world enough and time, he might also have included in his book.

Frank begins with a consideration of not a twentieth-century but a nineteenth-century novella, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground. He views this complex work, published in 1864, as a precursor of the turns the novel would take in the twentieth century. Part satire, part parody, the book luxuriates in paradox. Notes from Underground is narrated by a highly cultivated masochist, who suggests that perhaps his book was misgottten. “I believe I made a mistake in beginning to write this story,” he writes toward the book’s close, “so it’s hardly literature as much as corrective punishment.” Notes from Underground has neither a happy nor sad ending, or really any ending at all. In the Ralph E. Matlaw translation, it concludes, “The ‘notes’ of this paradoxolist do not end here, however. He could not resist and continued them. But it also seems to me that we may stop here.”

Nor did the book meet with a wide readership at its original publication. In his splendid biography of Dostoevsky, Joseph Frank notes that “it is very likely that he considered the work a failure” and that he “never again attempted anything so hermetic and allusive as Notes from Underground.” Yet in its pages Frank also sees an adumbrated Crime and Punishment and signs of the other great novels to come.

Of the thirty-two novelists whom Edwin Frank writes about in Stranger Than Fiction, three—the Austrian Alfred Kubin, the Japanese Natsume Sōseki, and the German Hans Erich Nossack—were previously unknown to me. I believe Frank overrates Lolita, and he goes on at some length about the French writer Georges Perec’s novel Life: A User’s Manual, which I found to be all but unreadable. He lavishly praises Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, which, when writing about it some years ago, I found marvelous all right, but wished it had been better. Ten or fifteen years of solitude would have been sufficient for me.

Many of the standard novelists, writers one would expect to encounter in a book on the twentieth-century novel, are here. In Frank’s pages one finds considerations of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers and Rainbow, James Joyce’s Ulysses, Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, and Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, which Frank calls “the most beautiful novel of the twentieth century,” a judgment with which I thoroughly concur.

At the heart of the book is the departure from the novels of the previous century established by twentieth-century novels. In the twentieth century, novels were written that had at their center homosexuality, alcoholism, antiheroes, magic realism, and more, much more not to be found in the novels of the preceding century. Frank never comes right out to say that the novels of the 1900s are better than those of the 1800s, but, in their expansion of subject matter, that is the assumption I took from his book—an assumption with which I do not agree.

Not surprisingly, a few important twentieth-century novels are missing from either Frank’s essays or his list. Notable among them are Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt and Main Street. These novels, whatever their artistic shortcomings, taught generations of Americans to look down on the middle class. John Dos Passos gets rather less attention than he deserves for both his literary ambition and innovative technique.

Another twentieth-century novelist who gets short shrift is Willa Cather. I happen to think Cather is the past century’s best American novelist. Frank cites her Professor’s House among the books he would like to have written about, but there are also O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, and My Ántonia (sometimes known as the Prairie Trilogy) and, in some ways the most extraordinary of all, Death Comes for the Archbishop. Cather’s subject is that great, perhaps greatest, American subject: immigration to a new land.

A novelist and short-story writer who gets no mention whatsoever in Stranger Than Fiction is Isaac Bashevis Singer. When from time to time I am asked who among the writers of the past half century is likely to be read fifty years from now, Singer’s is the first name that comes to mind. His novels and stories can be sexy, but sex, unlike in many of the novels of Norman Mailer, William Styron, or Philip Roth, is never chiefly about sex. His stories are about that much larger subject, the argument of human beings with God. What Willa Cather and Isaac Bashevis Singer have that too few of the other novelists discussed in Stranger Than Fiction possess are central, important, great subjects. “Ay,” said Goethe, in his conversations with Eckermann, “what can be more important than the subject, and what is all the science of art without it? All talent is wasted if the subject is unsuitable. It is because modern artists have no worthy subjects, that people are hampered in all the art of modern times.”

Frank gives Gertrude Stein an entire chapter, which he calls “The American Sentence.” In it, he claims that through her style “she also helped to transform not only the American novel but the twentieth-century novel.” He concentrates on her language, writing, “Overcoming the sense of uncertainty and inadequacy and isolation that had marked her childhood and her intellectual and sexual coming of age, she fashioned an instrument that allowed her to air and explore her most characteristic and intimate concerns—her sexuality, her femininity, her philosophical turn of mind, her love of words and wordplay at once childish and sophisticated—in entire freedom and in depth.” All this may very well be true, but none of it makes Stein very readable.

Stein’s influence on Ernest Hemingway is well known. Frank writes that “Stein, Hemingway would say, taught me to write. Famously, she also provided the epigraph to his own first novel, The Sun Also Rises: ‘You are all a lost generation.’” The problem here is Hemingway’s own writing. Hemingway was considered the great American novelist. In 1952 his last major work, The Old Man and the Sea, was published in its entirety in Life, then America’s most popular magazine. At the time, other writers allowed that Hemingway’s own style was an unavoidable influence on them.

No more, no longer. Ernest Hemingway’s novels have by and large been done in by that most ruthless of all critics, Time. Alexander Gerschenkron, a labor historian at Harvard, in a 1978 issue of the American Scholar set out three criteria for a good book: It should be intrinsically interesting, it should be memorable, and it should be re-readable. Hemingway, alas, passes only the second of these tests, and is today probably not worth reading much beyond anyone’s twenty-first year.

The twentieth century may have widened the subject matter of the novel, but it has failed to deepen it. H. G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling, and André Gide do not compare with Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, and George Eliot. Nor does anything in the past century’s French novel compare with the nineteenth-century novelists Balzac, Stendhal, and Flaubert. The Russian novel, from Pushkin through Isaac Babel, remains nonpareil. The argument could be made, and I for one would make it, that Leo Tolstoy was a greater writer than William Shakespeare. (Frank includes the twentieth-century Russian novelist Vasily Grossman among the subjects for his essays, but no mention is made of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.) D. H. Lawrence (born 1885), Virginia Woolf (born 1882), Marcel Proust (born 1871), and Henry James (born 1843) all had their literary roots in the nineteenth century.

But just now the novel of every century is in search of readers. For more than two centuries the leading literary genre, the novel at the moment seems to have a dim future. No other literary form engages so directly with human nature, none at its best rises above all other modes of thought in its engagement with humanity in all its variety, and none deals so deeply with the truths of the heart. The significance of its loss would be inestimable.