Since the late 1990s, the notion of American literature being determined (some would say limited) by the geographical parameters of the union's fifty states has been challenged in literary criticism. Recent theories include “global fictions” emphasizing the “re-telling” of American narratives informed and shared by other cultures,Footnote ¹ the border-hopping “Americas novel,”Footnote ² and the concept of American literature subject to “global remapping.”Footnote ³ However, Caren Irr's new study, Toward the Geopolitical Novel: U.S. Fiction in the Twenty-First Century broadens the scope of these transnational paradigms further, arguing for the emergence of a “concerted movement toward a new literary form: the geopolitical novel” (2).

Irr situates the American geopolitical novel as having shifted from introversion to “engagement with international literary scenes and traditions,” in a revision of the twentieth-century political novel and a challenge to suburban realism and MFA “program fiction” (6–9). This reframed “American” literature encompasses works “making an explicit effort to address an American audience,” while “correcting stereotypical American ideas about a particular region or the use of a common American narrative” (11). Additionally, Irr contends that, in a globalized age, “particular voice[s], style[s], and narrative frame[s]” are more indicative of “Americanness” than authorial biography in and of itself (11).

From this premise, Irr proposes five subgenres of the geopolitical novel: the migrant novel, the Peace Corps thriller, the national allegory, the revolutionary novel, and the expatriate satire. Each new subgenre is helpfully defined in the context of earlier genres and literary precedents (from Hemingway and Yezierska to Morrison and Lahiri), summarized in accessible tables illustrating the preceding genres and the updated versions, and an overview of the most common developments related to each new genre. Additionally, Irr conveniently provides ideological clusters for her authors, each defined according to the differentiation each author makes between the actual and ideal worlds that their works consider.

Irr has assembled a diverse selection of writers and texts for this study, taking in over 125 novels published from the late 1990s to 2011, considering works by canonized authors (Cormac McCarthy, Margaret Atwood, Russell Banks), rising stars (Junot Diaz, Gary Shteyngart, Dave Eggers), and relative unknowns. The collection's real coup, however, afforded by Irr's inclusion of non-American-born writers, is that she can study a number of fascinating recent “American” works by non-native-born Americans (Colum McCann, Teju Cole, and Joseph O'Neill, among others). This shift ultimately sees Irr propose the supersession of the “Great American Novel” by the “World Novel,” the geopolitical map and global citizen now comprising overlapping spaces and selves, expressing exhaustion with the limits of nostalgia and sentimentality concerning ethnic origins, and a greater identification between the protagonists and world Others (193–94).

Although Irr's study is ambitious, well structured, and articulate, there are some minor shortcomings. In terms of the book's geographical scope, it seems somewhat odd for Irr to have largely overlooked Canadian fiction, particularly works with geopolitical vision, such as Douglas Coupland's Generation A (2009). Irr's exclusive focus on novels is understandable for the texts' overall cohesion, but some contrasting analysis of recent key works of short fiction that arguably fit her criteria by the likes of Nathan Englander, Junot Diaz, and David Bezmozgis, for example, would test the adaptability and validity of Irr's ideas beyond the novel. Within that context, while the study makes every effort to contextualize and understand the impacts of numerous recent global twenty-first-century political revolutions reflected in American geopolitical literature, its conclusions inevitably still feel somewhat provisional (exactly how social alternatives to neoliberalism post-revolution will occur is speculative, Irr concedes (172–73). Furthermore, while Irr's consideration of the influence of the Internet and digital technologies in the geopolitical context is welcome, deeper consideration of these factors in relation to digital modernism and post-postmodern theory would have cemented the book's credentials in relation to currently debated academic theory.

These points aside, Toward the Geopolitical Novel is a welcome new addition to a growing body of critical work considering how American literature is increasingly “grappling with the pragmatics of global mobility and inequality and is learning to speak in a new voice, one that opens the door to a different kind of engagement with the world beyond the borders of the United States” (194). Persuasive and insightful, this text will be useful to established academics in American literary studies, in addition to researchers of contemporary American fiction, postcolonial fiction, and globalization at both undergraduate and postgraduate level.