Something's wrong with all of them

Engaging dissection of the 20th-century novel likely to send the reader in search for the book under discussion.

- CHARLOTTE GRIMSHAW

Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay, and his first impression was of “daybreak, light and colour and golden and purple fruits at the level of my shoulder”. It’s a memory of morning walks to the Bombay fruit market with his ayah, or nanny. Kipling’s first language was an Indian one. His parents’ house was not far from the Towers of Silence, where the Parsees left their dead to be eaten by vultures. He didn’t understand his mother’s distress when she found a child’s hand in the garden.

Kipling’s parents packed him off to England when he was 5 to live in a household where he was ill-treated by a fanatical evangelical Christian. Locked up alone for hours as punishment, he lived in his imagination. He would grow up to become the great writer, described by Henry James as “the most complete man of genius”, author of The Jungle Book and Kim, apologist for colonialism, eventual winner of the Nobel Prize.

These vivid fragments of Kipling’s life are a fraction of the rich detail on offer in Stranger than Fiction, Edwin Frank’s expansive, lively examination of the 20th-century novel.

Frank, editorial director of New York Review Books, conceived his project after reading an influential work by music critic Alex Ross. Ross’s book, The Rest is Noise, tells the story of modern classical music “in the light of the 20th century’s political, social and technological upheavals”. The book established classical music as a “shaping presence” in the cultural life of the century, influencing bands like Radiohead, for example.

Frank decided to do the same for the 20th-century novel. The task was to write “about art in a way that illuminates the art itself as well as the life of art in the world”. Beginning with Dostoyevsky’s Notes From Underground in 1864 and ending with WG Sebald’s