He is drawn to books that challenge the form itself in different ways, those that self-consciously or otherwise disrupt the more stately certainties of the great 19th-century novels. “The writers of the 20th century are ambushed by history,” Frank writes. “They exist in a world where the dynamic balance between self and society that the 19th-century novel sought to maintain can no longer be maintained, even as fiction.”
If Dostoevsky’s “unclassifiable” book – the structure of which resembles “nothing so much as a swept-up heap of broken glass” – set the pattern of that new relationship, Frank’s subsequent inquiries celebrate how the novel form became the place where changing ideas of fictional consciousness were tried out for size
— Read on www.theguardian.com/books/2024/dec/02/stranger-than-fiction-lives-of-the-twentieth-century-novel-edwin-frank-review
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