A Cat Chasing a Laser Beam

Over the course of 33 days, I read Edwin Frank’s Stranger Than Fiction. I set myself the arbitrary goal of reading exactly one chapter every morning I could, and the overall experience felt like a prolonged conversation with a warm and unassuming friend. In interviews, Frank has clarified that his book does not offer a survey or — “God forbid” — a theory of the novel in the modern era. Instead, with “the structure of something like a traditional biography,” he set out to narrate how the 20th-century novel emerged, changed, struggled, and grew old.