Writing the Past in Twenty-first-century American Fiction

Front matter

ai I rr he Past in first-Century eer exandra Laurie R i

The a

"P > Lj 4

Introduction

1. Historical Racism and Contemporary Incarceration in C. E. Morgan and Hari Kunzru

2. Ben Lerner and Literary Antecedents of the City 3. Dana Spiotta and Political Commitment

4. AIDS Activism and Looking Back in Tim Murphy and Garth Greenwell

5. Anxious Futures in Colson Whitehead and Omar

El Akkad

Conclusion

Bibliography Index vi

188 196

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to friends and colleagues who have offered advice and encouragement at various stages of this project; particular thanks are owed to Sarah Carpenter, Simon Cooke, Andrew Taylor and Jonathan Wild. I am also indebted to Randall Stevenson, not just for his support of the project, but also for reading and commenting on one of the chapters at a key stage of its development. And I am very grateful to Lee Spinks, who was kind enough to read several chapters in their draft form and offer insightful suggestions each time. I’ve also learnt a great deal from our conversations about American history and culture. Edinburgh University Press’s two anonymous reviewers provided careful and constructive feedback which helped shape my thinking throughout the project, and my editor Michelle Houston was enthusiastic and supportive right from the start. My thanks also go to staff at the Edinburgh University Library and the National Library of Scotland, to students on my Twenty-first-century Fiction course, and to my mother Lavinia and my sister Hope. This book is dedicated to Marlowe.

Introduction

In an essay for the New York Times in June 2021, the novelist Jonathan Lee declared that a reawakened commitment to historicity was now shaping the contemporary novel. He described how ‘For the past two decades, the novels celebrated for defining our time have almost always been books set within our time’, with historical fiction perceived as ‘fusty’ and ‘easy to caricature’. Yet more recently ‘the tone of such conversations has begun to change’, with the historical novel undergoing a revival, increasingly ‘embraced and reinvented’: witness, for instance, Colson Whitehead’s 2017 Pulitzer for The Underground Railroad, and his second for The Nickel Boys three years later. Even authors usually drawn to contemporary contexts, such as George Saunders and Lauren Groff, have ‘swerved into the past’ for their most recent works, driven backwards by a feverish cultural mood that feels altogether too transient to narrate. The current study examines a group of twenty-first-century novels profoundly shaped by the historical consciousness Lee describes, yet they also remain anchored, at least in part, to a present-day setting. In that sense they accomplish two feats at once: firstly, they reflect on the tumultuous events that have punctuated the new century, with references (both oblique and overt) to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, President Obama’s election victory, the 2008 financial crash, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the climate emergency. And secondly, alongside this sustained attention to the politics and culture of the new century, these novels are conceptually linked through their shared engagement in historical archaeology: each of them examines how aspects of America’s past exert various types of pressure on the contemporary moment. This forms the central concern of this study: it takes a group of novels largely set in a recognisable, present-day

America (C. E. Morgan’s The Sport of Kings, Hari Kunzru’s White Tears, Ben Lerner’s 10:04, Dana Spiotta’s Eat the Document and Innocents and Others, What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell, Christodora by Tim Murphy, Zone One by Colson Whitehead and Omar El Akkad’s American War), and explores how scenes and memories from an earlier period or periods repeatedly interrupt the contemporary narrative in ways which underline the past’s continued relevance to the characters’ lives.

These historical parallels and evocations, which are either recalled by the characters, described in narrative flashbacks, or emerge through recurrent images and motifs, compel the protagonists to regard their own contemporary experiences (and in many cases, their own struggles) as part of a broader pattern. In some cases, this is the re-emergence, in another place and time, of dormant feelings of shame or of centuries-old structures of discrimination; in another, less disturbing example, a narrator’s encounters on the streets of New York are reinterpreted through the redemptive influence of an earlier writer. Across five chapters the impact and focus of this historical awareness varies widely — from the ways in which political decisions relating to Vietnam half a century ago continue to be felt today, to the legacy of the HIV/AIDS crisis in narratives of queer identity, to the spectre of historical racism in contemporary structures of race-based oppression. In several of the novels the characters themselves are required to carry out the excavation work, as they unearth historical parallels, long-since buried, which help them make sense of their current circumstances: acknowledging past crises is for many of the protagonists a necessary step towards understanding the position they currently find themselves in, even if this does not lead directly to positive change. The novels use extended flashbacks and non-sequential narrative arrangements which appear to dissolve the distance between decades and even centuries, momentarily closing the gap between events and circumstances which are temporally far apart. These instances of temporal slippage allow the novels to foreground the recurrence of structural inequality, violence and discrimination, and (in response to those issues) political resistance through protests and demonstrations.

This interest in how structures and ideas from earlier decades rematerialise in the present day is not of course unique to writing of the new century: to varying ends, American authors including (but by no means limited to) James Baldwin, Michael Chabon, Don DeLillo, E. L. Doctorow, John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, Norman Mailer, Toni Morrison, Bharati Mukherjee, Tim O’Brien,

Richard Powers, Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth, Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, Kurt Vonnegut, Alice Walker and Richard Wright have traced how individual lives are reshaped and even blighted by the reappearance of historical pressures. To take one example from that list: Schaeffer’s 1989 novel Buffalo Afternoon describes the horrors of the Vietnam War and its lasting effect on veterans such as Pete Bravado, an Italian American from Brooklyn who enlisted at the age of seventeen and spent a year on combat duty. While Pete’s disturbing experiences in Vietnam take up much of the novel, a long final section depicts his life after returning to America, where for the next two decades he is haunted by what he has seen and done — trauma which manifests itself in nightmares, hallucinations and acts of extreme and unprovoked violence. One of the novel’s final scenes takes place at a reunion dance for former soldiers; in a dreamlike sequence, Pete stumbles into a room where veterans can go back and redo a particular ambush or patrol over and over again. Pete’s friend Mickey, who has tried it three times already, marvels at how real it feels: ‘The foliage’s so thick in there you can hardly see your hand in front of you. Nothing’s changed, man’ (635). While Mickey wants to relive those experiences, Pete fears their reappearance, later telling Sal, an old army friend, that ‘The past’s a minefield, man. You learn more about life, you walk on new ground, you set something off. It turns out you didn’t forget after all’ (644).

Schaeffer’s novel is an earlier example of historical pressures (in this case, war trauma) stubbornly re-emerging in different contexts — a useful reminder that the collapse of temporal boundaries is not, by any means, a new contrivance in fiction. Nevertheless, this study identifies a heightened awareness within contemporary novels of the permeable boundary linking past and present, and — in some cases — of the possibility for a productive relationship between the two. The increased focus on historical sedimentation in novels published this century, this book suggests, is partly down to the level of disruption in American cultural and political life over the past two decades. But the somewhat paradoxical effect of this turmoil is not to impress on each character the sense that their own period is unique in terms of the changes taking place; rather, it encourages them to place these events in correspondence with historical precursors and consider their ongoing impact. The year 2020 seems particularly momentous, encompassing as it did a global pandemic, mass protests calling for racial justice following the murder of George Floyd, and the defeat of President Donald Trump after four divisive years. But the crises started mounting up almost as soon as the twenty-first century had begun: the contested election of 2000, which led to President George W. Bush’s victory by the narrowest of margins; thereafter the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 and the subsequent War on Terror, with wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; Hurricanes Katrina and Harvey; the financial crash of 2008; mass shootings, including at Sandy Hook Elementary School; and Trump’s presidency, which was mired in scandal and disarray — the Russia investigation, two impeachments, the white supremacist rally at Charlottesville and the rise of the altright, nuclear tensions with North Korea, the detention of migrant children on the US—Mexico border and, finally, Trump’s false accusations of voter fraud and his claim that the 2020 election was ‘stolen’. As later portions of this introduction will explain, moments of contemporary crisis depicted in the novels under discussion push the narratives backwards: when characters attempt to make sense of their disordered lives, this means taking a broader historical view, laying bare how past events persist in shaping the here and now.

Because the novels examined in this book are set predominantly in the twenty-first century, they tend to be categorised as literary fiction, contemporary realism or (in the case of Ben Lerner) autofiction. Their present-day setting also sets them apart from the more ‘conventional’ historical novels published in this century, which tend to remain within a specific historical period or periods, rather than base part of their narrative in the present moment. Jonathan Lee’s examples include Jennifer Egan’s Manhattan Beach (2017), which takes place in 1930s and ’40s New York, and George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo (also 2017), set during the Civil War. To these we might add Rachel Kushner’s first two novels, which are notable for their vivid depiction of specific historical settings: Telex from Cuba (2008) follows a group of American expatriates in 1950s Cuba prior to Castro’s revolution, and The Flamethrowers, published in 2013, is set largely in the 1970s New York art world, with stretches in Italy and Nevada, and shifts back in time to fill in the story of T. P. Valera, who grew up in Alexandria and Milan at the turn of the century, and went on to found a motorbike company, Moto Valera. Parallels between the 1970s and the years before 2013 (when the novel was being written) may be inferred — both were times of significant financial crisis, with New York as a case study in wealth inequality — but the novel stops short of any explicit comparisons. Marilynne Robinson’s second novel, Gilead (2004), shifts between earlier historical periods in ways that are more fragmentary and elusive: it is set in 1956, when John Ames, a Congregationalist minister in the small rural town of Gilead, Iowa, sits down to write an account of his life for his young son to read after his death. But the letter also includes details of Ames’s family history, in particular his grandfather’s friendship with John Brown, and his violent participation, on the abolitionist side, in Bleeding Kansas during the 1850s. His grandfather’s actions, and the consequent dispute between him and Ames’s father over the ethics of responding to the violence of slavery with further violence, forms a type of double narrative, with Ames’s advice to his son interrupted by often charged moments of recall. Like Kushner’s The Flamethrowers, the events described in Gilead might usefully be placed in dialogue with present-day issues — for example the Republican Ames’s repudiation of racial inequality during a key moment in the civil rights movement could reasonably be shown to anticipate the re-emergence, during the Trump era, of the rhetoric of white resentment. But this possible contemporary parallel is extrinsic to Robinson’s narrative, which never strays later than the 1950s.

This study draws a distinction between the category of historical novel where the narrative takes place in an earlier period or periods (even if contemporary resonances might plausibly be perceived), and texts which move freely and overtly back and forth between the twenty-first century and past decades or even centuries. This interweaving of past and present is just one of the features that sets them apart from the historical novel as conceived by Georg Lukacs in his 1937 work The Historical Novel. For Lukacs, the historical novel was an essentially realist form, epic in scope, and occupied by issues of nascent nationhood. He presented Walter Scott as his archetypal historical novelist, who portrayed historical struggles through ordinary individuals: these characters were ‘mediocre’, tending towards the ‘decent and average’ (36), but also representative, ‘in their psychology and destiny’, of ‘social trends and historical forces’ (34). By narrating history through the lens of ordinary people, Scott’s readers could see themselves represented on the page: he showed how the everyday lives of people like them were altered by the major crises and conflicts of their age, and they were also portrayed as active participants in those historical struggles; this lends the novels an immediacy and ongoing resonance. Lukacs wrote that Scott ‘makes history live’, as his writing ‘brings the past close to us’ (53); the novels are ‘both humanly authentic’ and ‘re-liveable by the reader of a later age’ (40).

Lukacs also emphasised Scott’s sense of ‘historical necessity’ (58), a progressive understanding of historical development which views the outcomes of past conflicts as having a positive transformative effect on the nation, while at the same time perceiving history as ongoing and developmental; Lukacs’s point was that history is an ‘uninterrupted process of changes’ and ‘has a direct effect upon the life of every individual’ (23). Lukacs’s book remains a classic account of the historical novel which still occupies a prominent position in more recent discussions of the form, such as Perry Anderson’s 2011 article ‘From Progress to Catastrophe’, which begins with Lukacs and Fredric Jameson, and argues for the historical novel as having been born out of the ‘romantic nationalism’ (24) generated across Europe in response to the Napoleonic Wars. Anderson describes how, from the highpoint of War and Peace and the 46-volume Episodios Nacionales by Galdós, as well as later examples by Robert Louis Stevenson and Edward Bulwer-Lytton, the genre went through a long period of decline, so that by midway through the twentieth century it was a purely lowbrow form: popular, formulaic and mass-produced. But Anderson’s account of how historical fiction has fared in recent decades is perhaps more relevant and certainly more arresting, as he describes how ‘abruptly, the scene changed’, and ‘in one of the most astonishing transformations in literary history ... the historical novel has become, at the upper ranges of fiction, more widespread than it was even at the height of its classical period in the early 19th century’ (27). Anderson attributes this remarkable ‘resurrection’ to the ‘arrival of the postmodern’, noting that ‘the most striking single change it [postmodernism] has wrought in fiction is the pervasive recasting of it around the past’ (27). And while he acknowledges that not all historical fiction of the past three decades contains postmodern features, he draws his most recent examples from among their ranks, including Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, William Styron and Toni Morrison.

While Anderson’s article is reluctant to look beyond the ‘postmodern revival’ (28), Alexander Manshel has identified, in a 2017 article, a more recent development in historical fiction, as he sets out to answer the question posed by Jameson in his 2013 The Antinomies of Realism: ‘What kind of History can the contemporary historical novel... be expected to “make appear” ? (263). Manshel’s response to this is: very recent history. He describes the emergence of a ‘new literary sub-genre’ which he terms ‘the recent historical novel’; these are novels which narrate twenty-first-century events such as 9/11, the Iraq war, the 2008 financial crisis and Obama’s election victory (n.p.). Manshel’s three examples are 10:04 and Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner, and Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being — novels which contain specific details and events which situate them in a recognisable time and place. Instead of depicting an ‘amorphous present’, these novels are ‘precisely datable’ (n.p.). For Manshel, this allows them to seem both relevant and authentic (‘the work is elevated by its contact with capital-H history’), but also means they contribute to the process by which recent events are historicised. Readers are invited to compare their own memories of a disaster with its novelised version, although in this re-telling they know how the event ends; this has a dual function, in that they perceive themselves as witnesses to history — their memories are now ‘the stuff of history and, what’s more, literary history’ — while reassuring them that those events are now firmly in the past, ‘marked through writing as a bounded and closed period of history’ (n.p.).

Manshel’s article can be placed alongside Theodore Martin’s Contemporary Drift (2017) as recent explorations into how we might periodise ‘the contemporary’ through fiction and film. The current study carefully examines the present-day context for each of the novels under discussion, but is generally less concerned with conceptualising the period than with establishing some of the parallels and resonances between earlier decades and the present time. The exception to this mostly ‘backward turn’ is the final chapter of this book, where portions of the ‘past’ under consideration are ‘now’ — the early years of the twenty-first century. Omar El Akkad’s American War and Colson Whitehead’s Zone One are both set in a near-future America blighted by decisions made in the present time; they explore how foreign policy manoeuvres and several decades’ worth of indifference about climate change could play out in the years to come. Mitchum Huehls would regard these as examples of the ‘historical novel of futurity’, a post-2000 approach which ‘renders the present as the prehistory of the future’ (146). But whereas Huehls regards this novelistic approach as a pragmatic response to ‘history’s inaccessibility’ in an era still marked by traces of postmodernism (148), my final chapter suggests that in a near-future America, ‘history’ — or more simply ‘the past’ — continues to hold sway as a compelling and ultimately fathomable presence. And just as the rest of this study explores how images, structures, and responses from multiple temporal periods might reappear within a single novel set in the present day, the novels by El Akkad and Whitehead do not confine their historical consciousness to the twenty-first century, but also contain allusions to earlier events such as the Civil War and Reconstruction.

The approach to literary historicity taken by the authors in this study might usefully be termed historical recursion or archaeology, and is emblematic of a larger novelistic drift already noted by a number of critics. Robert Eaglestone has suggested that ‘the past’s grip on the present has become even stronger’ in recent fiction; he terms this ‘the resurgent past’, by which he means ‘an intense concern for the impact of the past on the present’ (311), and the ‘ever more diverse and contradictory array of modes by which the past is represented, forms which far exceed the historical novel as usually conceived’ (312). Adam Kelly writes that ‘twenty-first-century novelists who attempt to connect past and present’ are generally ‘disinclined to see the present as a radical break from the past’ (50). And lastly Peter Boxall has argued that novels of the new century are attempting to ‘gain a new understanding of the way that historical material asserts itself in the contemporary imagination’; this ‘emergent mode of historiography’, he suggests, is characterised by a fresh commitment to what we might call the reality of history ... grounded in a keen awareness of history as event, history as a material force which is not simply produced by narrative, but also shapes and determines it (41).

Boxall makes the important point that twenty-first-century novels tend to treat history as a fixed and coherent reality, and this is true of the novels this study explores: aspects of the past might have been repressed, hidden or left unexplored in these fictions, but this does not mean that that history cannot finally be accessed, or that it remains irresolvable. This conception of historicity distinguishes these novels from much postmodern fiction, where received history is often regarded with profound distrust. Jameson famously declared, in Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) that the ‘postmodern’ is characterised by a ‘weakening of historicity’ as it grapples with the ‘disappearance of the historical referent’ (6, 25). E. L. Doctorow is Jameson’s exemplar of this position: Ragtime, he suggests, ‘float[s] in some new world of past historical time whose relationship to us is problematical indeed’, underlining ‘the evident existential fact of life’ that there is no longer ‘any organic relationship between the American history we learn from schoolbooks and the lived experience of the current multinational, high-rise, stagflated city of the newspapers and of our own everyday life’ (22). Jameson’s account of postmodernism’s ‘crisis in historicity’ (22) is taken up by Mitchum Huehls, who describes how novels by Doctorow, DeLillo, Morrison and Pynchon betray a ‘pervasive skepticism toward all foundational truth claims’, portraying history as fragmentary, indeterminate and beyond comprehension (141). In books such as Ragtime, Libra, Beloved and Gravity’s Rainbow, these authors present counterhistories — re-writings of historical events that not only problematise the received narrative, but also the process by which those ‘truths’ were constructed in the first place.

History, in these and other postmodern writers, is presented as ‘flamboyant cartoon’, ‘magical myth’, ‘paranoia’, ‘metafiction’ or ‘unknowable trauma’ (Huehls 141). In Libra (1988) the historical facts are available in voluminous piles; the mistake is in imagining they might generate a single and unambiguous interpretation. DeLillo presents the assassination of John F. Kennedy as a CIA plot orchestrated by a group of former agents still smarting from the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, who determine that the US government could be forced into a second invasion if they can choreograph an event ‘that will make it appear they [Cuba] have struck at the heart of our government’ (27). In Lee Harvey Oswald they find their ideal assassin: a former marine and communist sympathiser who defected to the Soviet Union. Now back in America, he produces a trail of evidence the CIA men would have otherwise had to create in order to make him seem a feasible assassin, and he therefore seems a ‘quirk of history ... a coincidence’, who ‘matches the cardboard cutout they’ve been shaping all along’ (330). Oswald too feels ‘swept up, swept along’ by history, as a series of coincidences, premonitions and patterns convince him that his ‘destiny’ (277) is linked to Kennedy’s death. But the ‘third line’ which ‘bridges the space’ (339) between the CIA plot and Oswald’s own plan is impossible to make out: in a substrand of the novel, Nicholas Branch, a retired CIA analyst who spends years attempting to write a secret history of the assassination, finds that while the facts of the case are available to him, their connection to each other seems to defy logic and deny meaning.

DeLillo, alongside his contemporaries Toni Morrison and Thomas Pynchon, continued to produce major work in the 1990s and beyond: their respective novels Underworld, Paradise and Mason č Dixon were all published the same year, 1997. These novels’ construction of alternative histories, and their inclusion of conspiracy theories and magical elements, contribute to the sense that historical fiction of that decade still tended to regard history as inconclusive and subject to revision; Huehls suggests that historical novels of the 1990s ‘struggle to escape residual postmodern forms’, and this ‘threatens to foil these novels’ various attempts to capture history and produce historicity’ (140, 142). As Huehls acknowledges, this broadly accords with arguments put forward by Samuel Cohen in his 2009 study After the End of History: American Fiction in the 1990s, which considers how 1990s authors set out to reassess ideologydriven ‘truths’ about America’s national character and its victorious past. Cohen suggests that between the end of the Cold War and 11 September 2001, American culture ‘took on a markedly retrospective quality’ (10). Finally released from the decades-long threat of nuclear war, writers took the opportunity to reconsider America’s ‘continuing reliance on particular narratives’, particularly the ‘triumphalist school of American history’ (7) which re-surfaced after the Cold War. Cohen takes a group of mainly postmodern writers (Pynchon, DeLillo and Morrison, but also Roth, Didion and O’Brien) who, in contradistinction to Francis Fukuyama’s famous 1989 declaration, refuse the reassuring sense of closure that comes with that ‘end of history’ narrative.

These authors construct ‘counternarratives’ (28) which suggest history ‘might have turned out differently, or might still’ (52), and explore ‘the effects of myth’ (the stories America tells about itself) ‘on the way history is understood’ (83). For Cohen the 1990s was an ‘interwar decade’, coming as it did between ‘the fall of the Wall and the fall of the Towers’ (4). Stephen J. Burn, in Jonathan Franzen and the End of Postmodernism (2008), considers the decade to be ‘transitional’ (9) in the development of the American novel: while the surviving first-generation postmodernists raged against the dying of the light, a new generation of writers (whom Burn terms the ‘post-postmodernists’) tended towards realism over metafiction, and plot over formal experimentation, though they shared with their predecessors the ‘ambition to produce an encyclopedic masterwork’ (20), and included ‘knowing winks to the reader’ about those older writers in their own novels (19). Most importantly in this context, Burn identifies that we get a ‘fuller sense of a character’s personal history’ in the work of post-postmodernists like Jonathan Franzen, Richard Powers and David Foster Wallace, because they ‘more freely interrupt time’s passage through strategically deployed analepses’ (24) — the flashbacks represent ‘a younger generation’s more fundamental belief in the shaping influence of temporal process — that the things that happen to you in the past make a difference to who you are in the present’ (25).

In Franzen’s The Corrections (2001), each of the novel’s long sections focuses on a different member of the Lambert family, usually beginning in the present day of the narrative before rewinding to significant moments in the previous days, weeks or years which help illuminate their current circumstances. The novels examined in the current study also make substantial use of analepsis, but these flashbacks are not only a means of revisiting an episode that felt significant for an individual character; often they return to periods and events which had far-reaching implications for the nation as a whole. Some of these flashbacks are therefore embedded, at least partly, in specific events and organisations — in Spiotta’s Eat the Document, the protagonist is a former member of 1970s militant group the Weatherman Underground Organization; in Murphy’s Christodora one of the central characters was a leading figure in ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power). Each novel also stages its non-linearity differently. In Christodora the narrative is presented largely nonchronologically, with the date given at the start of each chapter. This non-sequential arrangement produces a range of effects: at the most obvious level it encourages the reader to modify their view of a character or situation once the back story has been filled in, but a more significant consequence is the redirection of emphasis away from a character’s trajectory (because that has already been established), and onto the reasons behind the often startling alteration in their circumstances. (Even when a pair of chapters are presented in order, they might be set several years or even decades apart, and this too emphasises the changes that have been wrought.)

But the most important effect of this non-linear structure, and one which is common to all of the novels in this study, is to call attention to the porous relationship between past and present: in the case of Christodora and of What Belongs to You the distance between historical periods seems to melt away altogether as the shame and grief of an earlier era continues to shape the responses of the central characters. This is perceptible in Morgan’s The Sport of Kings, too, where the temporal shifts are less clearly marked: the novel consists of long sections which move across the period 1783 until 2006, the roving narrative eye taking in slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the civil rights era in the South and the War on Drugs movement. In each section the reader has to piece together references to the wider historical context in order to establish the exact setting, and in a sense that is exactly the point: the novel captures how racist structures and violence endlessly repeat, regardless of year or context, over more than 200 years, including in the contemporary period. In Lerner’s 10:04 the various temporal shifts are even more subtle and indistinct: Ben, the narrator, is on a writing retreat in Marfa when his identity starts to merge with that of Walt Whitman during the Civil War era; meanwhile lines from modernist poetry and prose also occur to him seemingly at random, suggesting he is subconsciously eliding his own experiences in twenty-first-century New York with those of prior interpreters of urban life. Ben slides uneasily between the 1860s, the 1920s and the 2010s; at one point he describes himself as ‘falling out of time’, a phrase which usefully captures the thematic concern of this study as a whole, as well as the structural devices employed in each of the novels. The point to be made is that in each of the novels those earlier scenes or motifs do not exist only in the past, but are continually reconfigured in new contexts, interjecting themselves into the contemporary in ways which range from the revelatory and affirmative to the frightening or simply demoralising: in Eat the Document (which ends in 2000), a new generation of teenagers seems unwilling to protest against globalisation and corporate greed, and the novel juxtaposes this with the energy and commitment (but also violence) of their parents’ anti-capitalist stance some twenty-five years earlier. The connection between past and present has a more destructive effect on Allmon Shaughnessy, the young Black man at the centre of Morgan’s novel: when he discovers how long-established those racist structures of control really are, he judges them insurmountable, and starts to lose hope.