This chapter explores fiction of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century in the twin contexts of American writing after postmodernism and climate change. It argues that Ruth L. Ozeki’s My Year of Meat and Jonathan Franzen’s Purity both ultimately undermine the connection between individual agency and effective political action – the former because of its vacillating metamodernist sensibility, and the latter as a consequence of the author’s retreat to realism and undermining of character – but that Richard Powers’s The Echo Maker, by gesturing towards a posthumanist perspective, intimates a way through the impasse.