A review of Rachel Greenwald Smith, Affect and American Literature in the Age of Neoliberalism. Cambridge UP, 2015.

In recent scholarship about contemporary literature, it has become in vogue to declare the death of postmodernism as an appropriate periodizing break for thinking of the contemporary as a unique, twenty-first-century category. In her first monograph, Rachel Greenwald Smith contributes to this conversation about “the contemporary,” but unlike some, she offers up the economic (and therefore, political and social) practices of neoliberalism as the parameters for defining contemporary literature and its various forms. Smith further defines neoliberalism with respect to affect, namely, that neoliberalism’s relationship to affect presents much more starkly than affective conditions in other periods precisely because of the unprecedented expansion of privatization, free market ideology, and individualism that has infiltrated both the external economy and the internal lives of its subjects. Many scholars of contemporaneity have connected neoliberalism to affect; however, Smith highlights the productivity of literary “feelings that are not as easily identifiable as such to readers trained to look for emotional payoff for their readerly investments” (33). In so doing, Smith maintains that in contemporary literature, there are affective modes that cannot be reduced to entrepreneurial individualism.
 
In Affect and American Literature in the Age of Neoliberalism, Smith argues convincingly against the “affective hypothesis” popular in literary studies. Smith defines this trend in literary criticism as “the belief that literature is at its most meaningful when it represents and transmits the emotional specificity of personal experience,” a theory Smith decidedly opposes, arguing that we do not require the presence of affect in literary texts in order to learn to be unique human beings, but instead, we need it so that we – as readers, subjects, citizens – can recognize neoliberalism’s impact on the human condition more collectively (1).
 
Smith explains that the prevalence of the affective hypothesis in criticism has surged under neoliberalism, not only because of the corresponding resurgence of books representing common personal feelings (such as fear, grief, happiness, hope, disappointment, and sadness)  alongside the exponential rise of neoliberal policies, but also because of the spread of the neoliberal market mindset into everyday lives. In the lived neoliberal experience, “feelings frequently become yet another material foundation for market-oriented behavior: emotions are acquired, invested, traded, and speculated upon” (6). Throughout her study, Smith’s smart and consistent deployment of the vocabulary of economic policy when describing emotions enhances her argument structurally, bolstering the connections between economics and literature. The way to combat this neoliberal, investment-oriented attitude toward feelings, Smith proposes, is via the writing and subsequent reading of literary works that employ what she terms “impersonal feelings.” Importantly, “impersonal feelings” are still feelings (and implied here is that Smith sees feelings as essential to literature to some degree), but feelings which are less recognizable, more complex, and difficult to assign individually, thereby challenging neoliberalism’s hegemony in our contemporary moment. These impersonal feelings are what allow novels to move away from the model of reader-character identification, instead providing a space for a wider range of affects.
 
Subsequently, the first chapter dives much deeper into case studies of both personal (Cormac McCarthy’s The Road) and impersonal feelings (Paul Auster’s Book of Illusions), the literary difference between them, and the reasons for Smith’s reliance on this terminology. Before she does so, however, Smith recalls the recent debates about novelistic experimentation between Jonathan Franzen and Ben Marcus and posits that experimental form on its own is not enough to disturb the neoliberal model, and that recent tendencies toward formal experimentation are not “merely a result of the march of literary history, but rather [they reflect] the growth of neoliberalism during the period” (33). However, Smith maintains hope for formal innovation and even for novels more generally. In fact, each chapter’s structure – a presentation of one complicitly neoliberal novel countered by another that better represents impersonal feelings – highlights Smith’s hopes for contemporary literature’s political potential. Ultimately, this lack of doom and gloom strengthens her work. Because neoliberalism holds so tightly that any movement outside of its reign seems implausible, Smith’s ability to posit literary solutions beyond the problem and its symptoms offers a refreshing relief.
 
Smith begins with The Road, a minimalist work sans punctuation, which, like all of the novels considered, is experimental to some degree. It would seem that the sparse details of McCarthy’s minimalism might remove the threat of neoliberal personal identification with characters, which, in Smith’s view, repeats and helps to further internalize the affective hypothesis and its relation to neoliberal conditions. And yet, Smith argues, what actually occurs is an even more intense attachment to the father and son protagonists because they are all we have to gravitate toward, thereby creating “a contract with the reader…not by producing an engaging plot, or offering much in the way of concrete and applicable forms of instruction, but by eliciting intense emotional engagement out of readers and returning to those readers a sense of emotional connection with two particular, irreplaceable people” (46). The Book of Illusions, on the other hand, operates under a detached tone that strips the personal element out of the reader-text relationship and “tells a series of stories that chronicle experiences of the loss of self, affective investments in works of art, and momentary connections with others” (54). This, in turn, elicits a more complex – because it is not readily identifiable – emotional response. And so, these more distanced, nuanced emotions (often having to do with the feeling of being unable to identify one’s feelings) are privileged by Smith over those more easily identifiable and more common emotions like sadness, anger, and disappointment.
 
Chapters 2 and 3 shift away from general definitions of key terms and toward the more specific considerations of the 9/11 novel and what it means to read (and write) like an entrepreneur. Smith aligns with other scholars of contemporary literature by zeroing in on the events of September 11, 2001 as one possible periodizing starting point for the category of not just contemporary, but also neoliberal literature. For Smith, the novels which forcefully imply that 9/11 was a tragic, but “transformative” event, fail to simultaneously acknowledge the exponential advancement and expansion of neoliberal ideologies put into effect in the aftermath of the attack, when citizens were most vulnerable to such manipulation (61). Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close serves as the case study for the type of novel that presents 9/11 as such a disruptive event. A less neoliberal novel, however, would position the attacks not as a break from the norm, but as one event in a series of already existing geopolitical conditions. The more inclusive and understanding novel – Smith suggests – would be like the much less well known The Exquisite by Laird Hunt, which provides “no tonal guide” for affective response to 9/11, and which, although the narrative commences on this same date, does not centralize “‘the recent events downtown’” (71). Therefore, this better represents the un-representability not of the trauma of 9/11, but of “the intricacy of the web from which it emerges and causes to vibrate in turn” (75).
 
Just as Smith outlines the limits of writing about trauma’s emotional impact in Chapter 2, Chapter 3 depicts the limits on the “freedom of choice” that neoliberalism purportedly values. In fact, the supposed choices of everyday life appear so expansive because we have been led to believe that choices and emotions need to be rational. Contrary to this, of course, we are often aware of how the choices we make are attached to emotions, emotions easily manipulated by economic and political forces. Smith connects this tension to literature by comparing two works that present its readers with choices – Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and Ben Marcus’s The Age of Wire and String. Smith reads Heartbreaking Work as a self-aware choose-your-own-adventure story that, despite its footnotes, parentheticals, and breakings of the fourth wall, still leads us to the bottom line: a distinct emotional identification with the narrator and sympathy for his struggle to raise his younger brother.
 
No matter whether or not we choose to skip the portions of Eggers’s text that he encourages us to skip, Smith argues, each reader reaches the same affective conclusion, and thus arrives at a redemptive identification that shores up the neoliberal subject. Unlike in previous chapters, here Smith gives away – albeit subtly – her own personal feelings toward the book, calling it “captivating” and “an extraordinary reading experience” (88). Once this rare moment reveals itself, one wishes Smith would delve further into similar readerly emotions in other sections as a means by which to contemplate her own personal feelings against those of other reviewers, critics, and readers. Jennifer Doyle, in Hold It Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art, spends significant time grappling with the emotional relationship between author and reader, noting that emotion is “where ideology does its most devastating work” (xi). But, as Catherine Zuromskis notes in her review of Doyle’s book, “this fact does not make our feelings any less authentically or individually felt.” Because we get a glimpse of this in Smith’s reading of Eggers, we wish for more of this kind of interpretation of contemporary fiction, one that considers the emotions of the critic as participating in and susceptible to the same neoliberal, emotional attachment she warns against.
 
Smith does not divulge as much attachment to The Age of Wire and String, which nonetheless, in its opacity and purposefully difficult reading experience productively offers “an awareness that reader mastery is impossible,” an awareness which is “created not for its own sake – not to make readers feel powerless or passive – but as an attempt to create the specific feeling of what it feels like to think outside of one’s forms of daily awareness” (94). This is, in turn, one example of “impersonal feelings.” Part of Smith’s analysis of these two works rests on the idea of the “contract” between reader and writer, which she mentions earlier in a discussion of Franzen. Is the novel a contract between reader and writer? If novels are both an object in the marketplace and a work of art, what responsibility do authors have to the reader, to themselves as individual art producers, and to our atomized, neoliberal society? If Eggers enters into a personal affective contract and Marcus specifically chooses not to write in a definable way, aren’t their contracts just different? These questions, of course, subscribe to an understanding of aesthetics in which art is always under contract—a fundamentally neoliberal thought process. But since Smith offers a non-neoliberal alternative for feelings, can there also be a non-neoliberal loophole out of contract aesthetics?
 
Instead, in the final chapter, Smith takes a turn toward ecology, which she alerts us to in the introduction, arguing that unlike most other systems that have adopted and adapted to neoliberal market ideology, ecosystems have resisted even as the novel has continued to have difficulty expressing non-human relationships. Despite Smith’s earlier notice, the fourth chapter’s topic comes as a surprise in its intense focus on ecocriticism and environmentalism in literature, namely “the desire to represent ecological thinking as an alternative to neoliberal thinking on the one hand, and the danger that exists in making ecosystems the subjects of human narratives, and therefore domesticating them, on the other” (103), especially since none of the other chapters rely on a theme as external as this non-human framework. Smith’s close readings of Lydia Millet’s How the Dead Dream countered with Richard Powers’s The Echo Maker are very detailed and poignant, but feel out of place in the greater context of the monograph. Smith concludes: “Encounters with texts … do not merely represent non-human others, nor does the system by which we encounter literary works simply mimic an ecological system. Literature is part of our ecosystem” (126). While it might be easy to agree and see great value in this, it is more difficult to assert that Smith fully earns this closing thought given the lack of buildup to this chapter’s central point. While we can see how ecological thinking functions as an alternative to economic thinking in its broader consideration of social context, affect’s role in this continuum remains a bit murky.
 
In spite of the last chapter’s deviation, Smith’s book makes important contributions to affect theory, contemporary literary studies, and cultural studies more broadly, while also offering useful definitions for thinking about literary history and categorization. While the book takes on the political monster of neoliberalism, it shies away from race and gender, the latter of which has been particularly integral to the development of affect theory. Most of the works considered are by well-known male authors, and so Smith’s defense of her “eclectic” choices – which doesn’t appear until the epilogue – comes too late (127). Some authors who would have fit into her affectual, experimental framework include Junot Díaz, Louise Erdrich, Jennifer Egan, and Colson Whitehead, not to mention authors outside the scope of the United States, such as Roberto Bolaño, Tom McCarthy, or Zadie Smith. The focus on predominantly white, male writers is especially odd given race and gender’s intersections and interplay with neoliberal policy. Nevertheless, Affect and American Literature successfully and deftly portrays and classifies contemporary literature’s engagements with affect under neoliberalism. Moreover, the work challenges current critical practices by offering an alternative to the affect hypothesis and by remaining hopeful that literature can enact change in our privatized present.