As I’m typing this, to my left is a very long shelf that mostly contains novels by Barbara Pym, Muriel Spark, Beryl Bainbridge, Brian Moore, and Marly Youmans. A shelf above has a run of novels by Thomas Pynchon next to a number by Thomas Bernhard. Another shelf features Peter Handke. A photo of Herta Muller makes me think of a big stack of her novels upstairs. Ditto a photo of Solzhenitsyn. And what about all the crime novelists and writers of science fiction I love and admire? 

This list simply represents my own interests and some randomness. This is to say, when people talk about “the novel” or even about “books,” they are necessarily talking about the novels and books they happen to have read and heard of and become interested in. People talking about books can easily talk past each other. Academics have a solution to this, which is to act tribally and all focus on the same things at the same time. Most books on “the novel” are written by academics. In principle, I have nothing against their tribe. Many of my dear friends are academics. I read university press books voraciously. However, for some years now, particularly on certain subjects, academic scholarship has been infected by viruses of the mind. Recent books dealing from one angle or another with “the novel” are among those most likely to be exasperating in this way. 

Edwin Frank, however, is not an academic. He’s an editor with an encyclopedic knowledge of fiction, and he writes from a fresh angle. Frank has, for 25 years, been the editor of the wonderful book publishing imprint NYRB Classics, founded in 1999 with Frank presiding. His new book about the 20th-century novel Stranger Than Fiction draws on a quarter century of reading and searching through writing, which may explain why it is much better than so many similar attempts.