Amid the crude and unthinking calls for smaller government, or none at all, that so suffocate thought, we might wonder how novels can “encourage readers to rethink what governments can do” (218). John Marx identifies this as the administrative turn in Anglophone fiction at the turn of the twentieth century, faced as culture then was with the irrepressible fact of the decline of empire. Marx sets out to identify how “fiction refurbishes government as well as criticizes it,” and it is this dual focus that makes this argument a valued contribution to thinking about how fiction intervenes in the world (1). The text documents “how groups working with and against” the forces of empire “paved the way for postcolonial social order and even presaged managerial conditions that commentators typically associate with globalization” (3). Matched with this historical perspective is an effort to understand how “recent fictions retrace the steps that link contemporary to imperial social order, less to demonstrate Europe’s ongoing authority than to rewrite colonial history and to undo myths of total European domination” (5). Geopolitics and the Anglophone Novel, 1890–2011 refuses to understand governmentality as something that needs to be surpassed—perhaps in part because such a position has been so powerfully colonized by neoliberal ideology—and instead favors those texts that try to think with forms and possibilities of governing, whether these be the transformation of liberalism, the management of inequality, the emergence and failure of new states, women’s work, or entrepreneurship.

The book takes a unique methodological approach that seeks to work with multiple historical archives in order to construct genealogies of administrative concern. For example, wondering whether “hypotheses that patriarchy no longer exiles women to the margins of economic life” are correct (173), Marx proposes a genealogy that examines William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition and Monica Ali’s Brick Lane by tracing how these works transform conventions of critique established by Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, and Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day as they each sought to challenge Victorian domesticity. Marx’s interest in histories of critique and the possibilities they can and cannot imagine is an important contribution to scholarship on these novels. His insistence, moreover, upon the need for current negotiations of gender and sex to confront past forms of critique is well supported by this structure of analysis.

There are, however, difficulties with this approach. It leaves so much underexamined, unfortunately, because the analysis neglects so much of the historical specificity that belongs to each one of these works. Likewise, in this example, the very category of “woman” is taken for granted and given very little attention to they ways in which it names a condition of being enmeshed in relations of power that may be lived quite differently depending on geography, economic or racial privilege, sexuality, history, ability, and so on. If Marx’s approach can help to identify the ongoing concern with governmental and nongovernmental forms of administration that come into crisis at the end of empire, I wonder why only novels matter for this account, or perhaps why novels matter more than other aesthetic forms and other cultural matters that might similarly address themselves to questions of order and government. Most significant, for me, is the absence of a sense of the complexity of reading and figurative language and how these impact the meaning of these novels. When Marx notes, “If we are used to thinking of novels as acclimating readers to their individual natures, surely it is not a stretch to think that fiction can teach us other ways of conceiving our social selves” (217–218), I want to agree. I hesitate, however, because I know, too, that the lessons of fiction can never be guaranteed to arrive at their destination. Fiction teaches us the folly of imagining pure and unmediated communication as much as anything else. Marx may well be right about what this archive of fiction does, but more attention to the fraught nature of mediation and the unsecured supplement of reading would go a long way to convincing me that such gestures are effective and better articulate how fiction seeks to intervene in administrative matters.