Andrew Warnes's American Tantalus is a behemoth study of the pursuit of happiness and the oases of conspicuous consumption that haunt US culture. The book's point of origin is the myth of Tantalus, a Greek figure who was condemned to stand in a pool of water beneath a low-hanging fruit tree, the fruit perpetually eluding his grasp and the water receding before he could drink. Warnes argues that the experience of tantalization, a word derived from Tantalus' punishment, is prominent in US literature, “unfolding on the page with a regularity and a predictability one struggles to find in other national traditions” (6). In his new volume, Warnes provides both a fresh definition of tantalization and a broad survey of American art and literature in which “newness” and “nowness” (12) are analysed as defining anxieties of modern America.

Warnes has written widely about American culture, particularly on the relationship between race and food. His 2004 study, Hunger Overcome?, examines images of abundance and want in African American culture; his second book, Savage Barbecue: Race, Culture, and the Invention of American's First Food (2008), extends his work on race and food studies to show that barbecue is an invented tradition. American Tantalus takes up the dichotomy of hunger and surfeit analysed in Warnes's earlier work and places it within a broader spectrum of analysis. Stock images of the swimming pool are American Tantalus's defining motif. Recalling Zygmunt Bauman's notion of “liquid modernity,” Warnes argues that these images are pure, untouchable, and tantalizing. That is, just as hanging fruit eludes Tantalus, so, Warnes suggests, recurrent “incidences of impossible desire” (17) instil anxiety and neediness in the modern American as a host of objects beckon to them, only to quickly recede from touch.

After a wide-ranging introduction, American Tantalus follows a largely chronological structure that begins in chapter 1 with analysis of the Hudson River Valley school and the tantalizing prospect of the frontier. At times, Warnes is too defensive of his literary approach; his first chapter opens with an attempt to “justify” the “narrowness” (19) of its cultural focus when the most impressive aspect of the study is its generic and historic breadth. Beginning with a discussion of Sanford Gifford's A Home in the Wilderness (1866), Warnes links the famous artwork to John Cheever's 1964 story “The Swimmer,” and fiction by Richard Ford published in the year 2000. It is an ambitious literary project, but Warnes's writing has a discursive subtlety that ensures that his connections are light and convincing without becoming heavy-handed.

Indeed, Warnes uses this historic range to relate the tantalizing prospect of the frontier to the entanglement of hope and disappointment that drives American imperialism. If tantalization ends in obtainment, chapter 2 considers what happens “After the Frontier” in works by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. This chapter reflects on the voyeurism of the transcendentalist project, whose agents “installed bodily abandonment as a condition to their prospects of observing some interesting object, exchange, or scene” (50). Warnes considers the extent to which transcendentalist philosophy avoids the bind of tantalization by locating beauty beyond touch. Similarly, chapter 3 considers white America's desire to experience the “urban exotic” (90) of 1920s Harlem as part of a residual frontier mythology that erased local and minority identities in its pursuit of pleasure. Warnes reads the exploitation of minority cultures through a nuanced discussion of Richard Wright's Native Son (1940), Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye (1970), and Toni Cade Bambara's My Love (1972), continuing his analysis of Wright into chapter 4. This final chapter surveys a range of US narratives that acknowledge the constructed nature of “newness” but ultimately succumb to the myth of its “immaculate birth” (114), and, through close readings of John Updike and Raymond Carver, Warnes considers how advances in transport and communication systems treat human presence as infection.

As befits such a comprehensive volume, Warnes does not conclude American Tantalus but rather expands its theoretical territory. The conclusion looks to postmodern accounts of elusive desire and reads the concept of commodity fetishism outlined by Karl Marx in Capital (1867). This surprise turn provides a fitting end to a sweeping and often contrary study, gesturing to future research on the tantalizing effect of touchscreen culture and linking previous chapters together in new and unexpected ways.