Toward the World Novel: Genre Shifts in Twenty-First-Century Expatriate Fiction

The dream of the great American novel is past. We need to write the global novel.

Maxine Hong Kingston, “The Novel’s Next Step”

I am working myself up to writing a kind of epic global novel. I suppose a lot of people are always working themselves up to writing that kind of novel.

Kazuo Ishiguro, “In Conversation with Kazuo Ishiguro”

Since at least the late 1980s, ambitious writers have been imagining a new kind of narrative called the global, planetary, international, or simply “world” novel, and in recent years, their visions have started to come to fruition. Paralleling the much-remarked phenomena of accelerated migration and increased interpenetration of global markets, this new genre of the novel is changing the face of twenty-first-century US literature. Most importantly, the world novel is beginning to make global conditions newly legible to American readers.

For some readers, this world or worldly novel replaces the Holy Grail of an earlier generation—the so-called great American novel.¹ Yet several features thought to characterize the world novel also seem to derive from the earlier form: namely, multistranded narration, broad geographical reach, cosmopolitan ethics, multilingual sensitivity, and a renewed commitment to realism.² With the possible exception of multilingualism, all of these features could also describe Dos Passos’s Depression-era U.S.A., for example, as well as characterizing recent novels celebrated for their worldliness, such as Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) or Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun (2006). Recognizing this continuity in form, a number of critics have identified national narratives that might inspire contemporary global fiction. Political scientist Benedict Anderson proposes José Rizal’s classic of the Filipino anti-imperial movement, El Filibusterismo (1891); Malcolm Bradbury offers Angus Wilson’s East/West fantasy, As if By Magic (1973); and Guy Reynolds suggests Worlds of Color (1961), the final volume of W. E. B. Du Bois’s trilogy on African-American family life. Tim Brennan’s candidate is Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch (1963), and Salman Rushdie’s somewhat underrated novel of Bombay musicians turned international celebrities, The Ground Beneath Her Feet (2000), has been mentioned more than once in this context as well.³

The influence of national predecessors on international writing is sometimes thought to be a liability, as in Joseph Slaughter’s critical assessment of the influence of the Goethian bildungsroman on human rights talk and the postcolonial novel, but not always. In Culture in the Age of Three Worlds (2004), Michael Denning imaginatively pairs his own suspicion of the “marketing category” of the world novel with an investigation into mid-century American proletarian fiction. Denning offers the innovative thesis that the broad reach of a Gabriel García Márquez or a José Saramago might owe more to the explicitly internationalist politics of the earlier generation of leftist writers than to the blander international style favored by multinational media conglomerates.⁴ Although the specific ideologies of the left-wing writers Denning discusses rarely make explicit appearances in US fiction of the last 10 or 20 years, this earlier generation’s interest in situating national crisis in a global market suggests a model for understanding the transition from national narrative to world novel. Extrapolating from Denning, we can understand the world novel as arriving when the genres of the nation stretch to incorporate politically charged elements of the global scene.

Genre theory prompts us to a similar proposition. As Rick Altman argues in a classic article in cinema studies, new genres usually emerge when the inclusion of new semantic material forces a transformation of an existing generic syntax.⁵ Genres such as the national novel change shape and push past their earlier limits when they strain to accommodate new content. After a form exhausts its efforts to mold the content to the existing genre, a transition—often recognizable only in retrospect—arrives. In a flurry of invention, a genre shift occurs.

Without contesting this pattern for the emergence of new genres, not all observers agree that...