Nicholas Robinette’s Realism, Form, and the Postcolonial Novel takes up the challenges and the possibilities of realism as both a distinctive literary style and an interpretive framework through astute analyses of literary theory and three works of postcolonial fiction written by authors from the periphery of the contemporary world system. The term peripheral realism was coined by Jed Esty and Colleen Lye in a 2012 special issue of Modern Language Quarterly. Because Robinette is not only recognizing but also developing this concept as it informs and is transformed in different ways by various postcolonial writers and texts, readers are encouraged to consult Esty and Lye’s essay to better grasp this monograph’s point of departure. This is not to say that Robinette’s thinking is merely derivative. On the contrary, his introduction brings a refreshing perspective to the realism-modernism debate by reassessing the work of critics such as Georg Lukacs—often seen as a stalwart champion of realism against the avant-garde—in order to show how realism not only allows but also embraces the kinds of formal experimentation and innovation so often associated with modernist aesthetics. Robinette further develops the salient point that any cognitive mapping of the world system generated through the dialectical tension between literary realism and modernist writing must be reconfigured if the socio-political circumstances of writing and reading are not those of metropolitan Europe but instead those of the postcolonies or other countries on the periphery. From their particular vantage points, Robinette argues, George Lamming, Nuruddin Farah, and Zoe Wicomb employ realism as literary style and interpretive framework to map out the totality of social forces glimpsed from their positions in the world system.

Robinette considers the transformations of peripheral realism in three chapters with close readings that are meticulous and nuanced, attentive both to each writer’s historical and cultural context as well as the theoretical positions staked out by the writers themselves. In Robinette’s analysis, George Lamming’s The Emigrants expresses newly arrived Caribbean immigrants’ unstable and constantly shifting diasporic subjectivities and class positions through a protean and fragmentary style that nonetheless gestures toward recognizable social and geopolitical problematics of the post-imperial world. Moving from diaspora to dictatorship, Robinette traces numerous linguistic interruptions and irruptions in Farah’s Sweet and Sour Milk to show how this lack of discursive lucidity and refusal of transparent representation may be considered a feature of peripheral realist style because clarity and transparency cannot be easily achieved or performed under the socio-political conditions of dictatorial rule in Somalia. Wicomb’s You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town offers brief, momentary glimpses of a transparent state and utopian society by combining details of everyday life in South Africa with a self-reflexive language consciousness in a configuration that Robinette (quoting Jacques Ranciere) calls an accompaniment that introduces a new historical dialectic.

Although Robinette’s writing is engaging and accessible, there are a few points he could have elaborated or clarified a bit more. First, by his own admission, the three literary texts examined are all examples of the writers’ early work. Does the peripheral realism of the earlier period persist throughout the writers’ careers, and what significance does recognition of earlier realist strategies have on our critical assessment of later texts such as Lamming’s Water with Berries or Wicomb’s Playing in the Light? Second, given the different permutations of peripheral realism that are examined throughout the book, it is sometimes confusing when certain adjectival forms—such as experimental realism, interrupted realism, or epistemological realism—occur without enough contextualization or explanation. Third, although Robinette does quote from and discuss the three writers’ remarks about realism at the beginning of each chapter, it might have been helpful to inductively frame a theory of realist form based on the writers’ essays or comments in a separate chapter or in the introduction. It is possible that the constraints of Palgrave’s Pivot series (with a maximum of fifty thousand words per book) might have prevented these elaborations, but the concerns mentioned here do not detract from what is, overall, a thought-provoking and compelling argument.