By JULIA LICHTBLAU

I picked up Stranger Than Fiction, Edwin Frank’s relay race through the twentieth century novel, immediately after rereading Madame Bovary, only to encounter Emma Bovary, who came into the literary world in 1856, in the first chapter.

Frank isn’t simply paying obligatory homage to Flaubert’s importance to the nineteenth-century novel. He’s pointing out the cinematic modernity of the famous agricultural fair scene which splices the full-of-himself aristocrat Rodolphe seducing Emma, the country doctor’s bored wife, with pompous local officials making speeches. He’s also showing that the nineteenth century novel, with its formidable, reality-affirming scenic machinery, was still in full flower when Fyodor Dostoevsky’s radical and baffling Notes from Underground, which Frank pegs as the first twentieth century novel, emerged barely a decade later. If the nineteenth-century novel “attempts to maintain a dynamic balance between the self and society,” the exterior world barely seems to exist for Dostoevsky’s narrator, whose mind churns through semantic and philosophical problems for much of the text. Yet, the book was anchored in reality—the political and social problems of Russia and the personal torment of its writer—in a new way.