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Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel
In “Stranger Than Fiction,” Edwin Frank asks: What was the twentieth-century novel?
In his stylish, selective survey Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel, he focuses on the genre’s formal innovations, which take readers’ minds off their somewhat vulgar appetite for suspenseful plot and relatable character and teach them to be satisfied, instead, with something like a diet of single sentences, exquisitely prepared. That route could lead to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, where the brutal colonialist Kurtz is a kind of double to Marlow, who is at least somewhat critical of colonialism, and from there to its Sudanese reversal in Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North(reissued, with the gratitude of many, by New York Review Books Classics). The problem with stopping in 1987 is not just one missing decade, though readers will regret the omission of writers like Caryl Phillips, Jeanette Winterson, James Kelman, Ben Okri, Ian McEwan, Irvine Welsh, Alasdair Gray, Martin Amis, Margaret Atwood, and Edward P. Jones, among others.
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