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.

Moving from the more explicitly political fiction of the 1930s and 1940s to the critiques of neoliberalism that emerged at the end of the century, this chapter traces how American realist writers engaged with the political questions that challenged and transformed the United States in the twentieth century. Despite realism’s association with progressive politics during the first half of the century, this chapter explores how American writers did not present a unified political voice; the views expressed in realistic fiction were as wide-ranging as the writers who produced them. The central part of this chapter considers how midcentury writers – a group that includes Ralph Ellison, J. D. Salinger, Philip Roth, John Updike, Ann Beattie, Raymond Carver, John Cheever, and Richard Yates – embraced new forms of realism to engage with and critique the shifting political realities of American life. The chapter concludes by exploring how Chang-rae Lee and Jonathan Franzen employed realism as way of chronicling the questions and challenges that the nation faced at the end of the millennium.

My second chapter begins with a comparison of Jonathan Franzen and Ben Marcus, two writers who embody the competing aesthetic visions of contemporary “realists” and “experimentalists.” Focusing on their work and their high-profile debate about literary difficulty, I argue that their mutual commitment to their “community of readers” (as Franzen puts it) and to narratives of “the family gone wrong” (as Marcus puts it) actually points to a shared social vision, a vision in which “family” values are more important than aesthetic and political antagonisms. This focus on the family also cuts across the oppositions central to contemporary American politics, I show, and it informs the fiction and criticism of writers like Jeffrey Eugenides, Aimee Bender, and George Saunders. This domestic turn is figured, in several of these texts, as a revision of both American individualism and postmodern impersonality. I make the case that this triangulating impulse generates a range of formal innovations, from Eugenides’s re-invention of “the marriage plot” to Marcus’s self-reflexive blending of experimental impersonality and post-postmodern “emotionality.”