The novel exploded
Edwin Frank reads the classics
Here at Public Seminar, we’re taking a break from political opportunists and conmen to read about a better kind of fabulist: the novelist.
Edwin Frank, founder of the beloved literary imprint NYRB Classics, talks with Mitchell Abidor about his brand-new book, Stranger Than Fiction, a critical history of the novel in the twentieth century. “The era called for innovation,” Frank explains, “because remaking the form of the novel was felt to be the essence of what was occurring.”
And in an excerpt from Stranger Than Fiction, the author and editor considers how, through those innovations, the novel form became the way we measure what we are capable of: “good, evil, deception, irony, truth.”
Why the Twentieth-Century Novel Is Stranger Than Fiction
Mitchell Abidor, Edwin Frank
Mitchell Abidor: You focus on the sentence as the fundamental element, the fundamental building block of the novel. You also speak several times about the “American sentence.” What is it that distinguishes an “American sentence” from a sentence?
Edwin Frank: It came to me a long time ago, before I had the thought of writing this book. I wrote a short piece about Dreiser’s American Tragedy, another great book that could easily have been in Stranger Than Fiction. Dreiser’s notorious for not being a very elegant or stylish writer. He’s a really messy writer and throws in shapeless sentences, but it’s not just a question of shapeless sentences, he moves from jargon to the poetic. That shapelessness caught something very real about America, a country where people are trying to figure out new languages subject to consuming snake oil, including linguistic snake oil. Dreiser’s messiness, in a way, is not that far from what we see as already there in an antithetical writer like Henry James, or—even more—like Gertrude Stein. It was Stein who realizes this as a defining characteristic of American writing. It’s Stein who lays this out and who raises the matter of how the American sentence can assume any scale. What kind of language to use, what kind of shape sentences can have, these are the kinds of questions that are alive for American writers who are trying in some sense to invent their own idiom, in a way that certain questions about the novel were alive for Russians as well.
Stranger Than Fiction
Edwin Frank
Far from slipping into notoriety and obscurity over the course of the last century, the novel had attained an even greater centrality to literary culture than it enjoyed in the past. It stood now as the literary form of the time, prestigious, popular, taken as both a mainstay of cultured conversation and of democratic culture. At the end of the twentieth century, the American pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty went so far as to anoint it the touchstone of contemporary ethical awareness. Without a doubt, the novel was central to a certain contemporary sensibility: where, for example, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, educated English speakers would have turned to the ancients, to Shakespeare and the poets, and to the Bible for edification, in Rorty’s account they now picked up Lolita.