Contemporary Literature and the End of the Novel: Creature, Affect, Form by Pieter Vermeulen (review)

Pieter Vermeulen’s Contemporary Literature and the End of the Novel takes up a favorite trope of lit mags and opinion pages: Are we watching the death of the novel as a literary form? Vermeulen is quick to point out that this question is nothing new. Even in the days of Miguel de Cervantes and Laurence Sterne, critics were already asking if the novel had worn out its usefulness. In this sensible and significant work, Vermeulen does not seek to answer the question; instead, he argues that perpetual anxiety over the novel’s imminent demise is artistically productive. For Vermeulen, those who would kill or eulogize the novel are always by the same gesture reviving and reanimating it, and thus forcing it to adapt to contemporary concerns and investments instead of drifting, as he observes of the epic form before it, into irrelevance and obsolescence.

To make his point, Vermeulen focuses on a small collection of recent novels and critiques that take up the paradoxical task of memorializing and reanimating the novel. In the first chapter, he looks at Tom McCarthy’s 2005 novel Remainder. Vermeulen suggests that it aims to reimagine the traditional “realist” novel’s trauma narrative, which McCarthy has criticized as inadequate in the wake of 9/11. Remainder “challenges this tradition’s reliance on psychological depth and significant feeling” by offering a protagonist who is essentially depthless: the nameless narrator is all surface, while the traumatic event that launches the text’s action remains elusive and, in fact, irrelevant to the story (Vermeulen 24). The narrator’s actions in the wake of his trauma are repetitive and circular, never leading him toward any catharsis or sustained resolution, and “the strong emotions that we tend to associate with the human subject” are replaced with “diffuse and non-subjective affects” (30, 31).

Vermeulen connects McCarthy’s formal subversions with the work of David Shields, whose Reality Hunger attempts to escape the conventions of the novel by substituting those of other genres such as the memoir and the manifesto. According to Vermeulen, however, the novel “is the corpse that Reality Hunger insistently declares dead but does not manage to bury once and for all” (42). He suggests that Reality Hunger’s many novelistic elements ultimately recapitulate the form the text tries to dismantle.

In the second chapter, Vermeulen focuses on J. M. Coetzee’s later works as examples of what he terms “creatural life”—“a form of life that is inextricably linked up with, while not reducible to, animal life” (Vermeulen 49). Desire has long been considered an organizing principle of the traditional novel in that the text’s action is driven forward by the protagonist wanting something and seeking to satisfy this desire. Vermeulen contends that Coetzee’s late work offers narratives in which desire is replaced by animalistic suffering. His protagonists are physically pathetic and repellent, rendering their longings impossible to satisfy and therefore pointless. Even the author’s desires and intentions lack the power to drive the narrative forward, as represented in Coetzee’s novel Slow Man, which is about the relationship between a novelist, Elizabeth, and her protagonist, Paul. Paul’s “descent from subject to creature also drags the author away from her site of sovereignty” (64). In this way, Coetzee replaces the traditional narrative driven by desire and love with one more concerned with care and dependence. The protagonists are no longer independent subjects interacting with/acting on their social environment but are “abandoned creatures” who inhabit a “post-novelistic space” (49).

In chapter three, Vermeulen uses Teju Cole’s Open City to examine the “cosmopolitan conviction that the cultivation of curiosity and attentiveness is an appropriate tool for fostering connections beyond ethnic, cultural, or national borders” (Vermeulen 83). Open City, Vermeulen argues, seems to embody that conviction but undermines it by making apparent the lie of novelistic cosmopolitanism. Vermeulen observes that the novel’s protagonist is an aesthete and...