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.”