This essay responds to the perception that later twentieth-century experience underwent a shallowing of intensity – what Fredric Jameson famously diagnosed as a ‘waning of Affect’.

The essay reads this shallowing, as it is represented in the novel of the period, and as it reflects the logic of late capitalism, and of neoliberal culture. But while it examines the ways in which the novel partakes of this logic, it suggests at the same time that the experience of shallowness itself yields a particular kind of intensity, one which is at odds with its affective weakening. If we are to understand the relation between late capitalism, neoliberalism and waning of affect, we have to address the ways in which shallowness become its own kind of intensity – in which shallowness and intensity enter into a shifted relation with one another.

Reading the later twentieth-century novel from Philip Roth to Muriel Spark to Margaret Atwood to James Kelman, the essay argues that we can see a form of fictional expression emerging at this time, in which the novel does not abandon its commitment to forms of political intensity, but in which it rewrites the given relations between the weighty and the trivial, between weakening and intensifying, between fiction and reality.

How does the contemporary novel imagine utopian possibility in the wake of the global dominance of the United States in the second half of the twentieth century?  This chapter suggests that we can discern two forms in which the novel responds to this perceived waning of American power. The first of these is an elegiac strand in the contemporary American novel, which mourns the failure of the American ideal and laments the exhaustion of its historical possibility. The second sees in the same failure of US hegemony not the winding down of a world view, but the emergence of new forms of cultural hybridity, new subject positions that come to thought only now, in the wake of the “American century.” This chapter suggests that, in order to understand the persistence of utopian thinking into the contemporary moment, one has to attend to both of these strands in the novel after American hegemony. The old word is dying, we might say, in an echo of Gramsci’s famous line, and the new cannot be born. It is in this interregnum that we find not only morbid symptoms, but the emergence of new forms of utopian possibility.

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.

This chapter argues that the later twentieth-century novel can be read as an expression and a critique of the economic and political logic of neoliberalism. In works from Muriel Spark’s The Takeover, to James Kelman’s How Late it Was How Late, to Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, the novel form registers a certain shallowness of perception and of affect, that can be seen as a corollary to the dematerialising effects of late capitalism. But if this is so, the chapter argues that we should not read the novel of the period as simply symptomatic of the corrosive influence of late capital on our forms of realism. Rather, the shallow intensities that we find in Spark, Roth, and Kelman are the marks of a new form of fictional critique that is developing in the period, one that attends to a shift in the way that culture is reproduced under twentieth-century neoliberal conditions.

This chapter will address the place of the “Philip Roth” novels—which include The Facts (1988), Deception (1990), Patrimony (1991), Operation Shylock (1993), and The Plot Against America (2004)—within Roth’s career at large, as well as the critical response to those novels. In addition to being among the most evident examples of Roth’s postmodern techniques, this particular categorization of books is also unique because, unlike Zuckerman and Kepesh, the identity of the character “Philip Roth” himself shifts from book to book. For instance, while the “Philip Roth” of The Plot Against America is a character in Roth’s dystopian alternate history, the “Philip Roth” of The Facts and Patrimony is more closely aligned with Roth the author, adding new levels to his blurring of fact and fiction.

When Francis Fukuyama announced “the end of history” as the Cold War ended, he suggested that the teleology of historical progression had passed and that Western-style liberal democracy had prevailed. Postmodern American novelists, however, have portrayed not history’s end but its rebirth as a form of interrogation and reinvention. Recognizing that new technologies for instant representation (radio, television, the internet) have altered both our sense of history and the practice of history, postmodern writers treat history as something happening and being created in the present moment. Like currency, history becomes fungible. Consequently, received versions of history no longer have the same power. They are subject to exchange. It is not precisely that history has always been lies but rather fictions in which people may choose to believe. Writers such as Toni Morrison or Joan Didion write alternative versions of history that critique received exceptionalist, racist American ones. On the other hand, in the era of climate change, the “end of history” has taken on an apocalyptic valence as writers such as Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, and Kurt Vonnegut portray the end of history as the beginning of the Anthropocene era: truly the end of history.