Modern novelists can be divided into those who continue within a broad tradition of realism and those who experiment far more with the form of the novel. Writers such as john Galsworthy, Arnold Bennett, Graham Greene, Iris Murdoch, Doris Lessing, Ernest Hemingway, John Updike and Saul Bellow are essentially realists. They are less intrusive than nineteenth-century realists, presenting a credible picture in which we are not particularly aware of the narrator's presence. They deal with social, personal and ethical problems, and offer us an entertaining yet at the same time instructive look at how people cope with life in the twentieth century. The outstanding novelist within this tradition is D. H. Lawrence, whose novels conform to the usual pattern of presenting characters at odds with society, but Lawrence goes much further than other writers in a romantic quest for an alternative way of life. He feels that there must be a new way in which people can relate to each other. However, in his best novels, The Rainbow (1915) and Women in Love (1921), as committed as Lawrence is to exploring fresh areas of experience, writing in an emotional style that suits his subject matter, he never forgets that his characters are bound by all the demands of ordinary existence.
The other major novelists of the century all employ the same basic pattern of individuals in conflict with society or their families, but the most noticeable feature of many great twentieth-century novels is the extraordinary degree of formal experiment and innovation. This begins with the works of Joseph Conrad and Henry James. Conrad often uses a dramatised narrator, Marlow, and sometimes disrupts the time sequence of events. James's late novels, such as The Wings of The Dove (1902), repeat the story he had been writing for years of innocent young women coming in contact with a corrupt society, but become more and more elaborate, with extremely long sentences where it is often impossible to trace the line of thought. The reason for such innovations was the disappearance of shared values and shared beliefs . George Eliot writes confidently, as if she and her readers can share a view of the world, but at the end of the nineteenth century this confidence disappeared. A new awareness of individual psychology came into existence at this time. It began to be realised that everyone has a unique perception of the world. Conrad, therefore, employs a fallible narrator, who presents his own limited view of the experiences he describes, and in James's novels the sentences become confusingly long as he acknowledges that it is impossible to provide a definitive analysis of experience.
Such changes in thinking have two overlapping consequences for the novel. There is far more emphasis on the mind of the individual, something that is most apparent in the technique of stream of consciousness: a new way of writing that reflects a new view of the human mind.
The other consequence is that many of the great novels of this century advertise their own fictionality . Joyce's Ulysses (1922), for example, is written in a sequence of different styles: there is the world and various styles that try to make sense of the world, but each style is inadequate and incomplete. In the works of such writers as Joyce, Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner there is thus a mixture of the exploration of characters' minds and a way of writing that draws attention to itself Whereas the realistic novelist presumes to read the world, the experiments in fiction this century instead draw attention to the ways in which fiction tries to structure experience, for reality is always beyond the grasp of the text. This can become an arid approach if the writer is simply concerned with discussing the nature of fiction, but in Joyce, Woolf and Faulkner such an approach is effective because the technical experiments are prompted by a genuine awareness of life's complexity. Their oblique method of writing draws attention to itself, but in doing so does indirectly offer us a new view of the world. This awareness of the problematic relationship between art and life continues to be a major characteristic of much of the best contemporary writing. It perhaps reaches its most extreme form in the French nouveau roman, where, as in some novels by Robbe-Grillet, we can even be deprived of a plot and characters to hold on to, so that we have none of the conventional fictional devices for making sense of life. Rather more accessible is the work of Vladimir Nabokov, who constantly draws attention to the fictionality of his novels .
Many other contemporary novelists play with art and life in this way, but possibly the most original English-language novelist since Joyce is the American writer Thomas Pynchon. Gravity's Rainbow (1973) is a novel about the Second World War: the novel endlessly tries to structure and understand the chaos of war, but every time it holds out a promise of coherence or a thread of order it destroys it. A novel such as Gravity's Rainbow might not be easy to read, but this is because it is suggesting that the world cannot be read. Yet the novel also acknowledges the human refusal to concede to chaos, and how we are constantly engaged in trying to order and understand life. We might be aware of the disorder of life, yet we none the less strive to arrange life into a coherent story.
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