More impressively comprehensive than encyclopedic, Patrick O'Donnell does not try to cover every literary novel published in the last thirty years, but instead offers a broad critical overview of contemporary US fiction in terms that make The American Novel Now more than just a survey. Realism, postmodernism, history, identity, community and migration are used as headings to help organize the material, with familiar texts located alongside accounts of less well-known novels in terms that trace the continuities between them. By combining short sections focussed on the analysis of exemplary novels with summaries of comparable texts, O'Donnell is able to build his panoramic view of the subject as he goes. Significantly, he makes little attempt to create a hierarchy for these categories, but instead delivers something much more open and capacious. This is not the last word on the subject, but a beginning, a place to start for scholars looking to get to grips with the novels of the very recent past.

True, there is not much contemporary history here and little on the shaping influence of institutions (Oprah gets a few paragraphs, the publishing industry the occasional page, the Pulitzer a line or two), but perhaps O'Donnell's instincts told him that to give these contexts prominence might have taken something away from the primary object of his inquiries. It is the novels themselves that are his priority and the author's vast knowledge of them that is everywhere apparent. O'Donnell, a former editor of Modern Fiction Studies, knows these books so well that he is able to make countless deft connections between them, and his writing continually broadens our knowledge and adds to our range of reference. In the process, The American Novel Now makes its most telling contribution to the understanding of the contemporary novel. Obliging us to question the assumption that recent US fiction is the story of a famous few, O'Donnell insists that we take full account of the rich literary culture to which the likes of Roth, Morrison, DeLillo and Pynchon belong. The result is a book that pushes its readers towards a deeper understanding of the diversity of contemporary American literature. Beyond that, it brought me real pleasure for two particular reasons. First, it reminded me of the countless novels that have been published in the last thirty years that I have never quite got round to reading and renewed my determination to fill in some of the many gaps. Second, it brought books once read and then forgotten back to life and, more than that, it did so in ways that made me want to read them once again.