We live in an age of literary companions. Several presses keep churning out these large, attractive, and pricy hardcovers with chapters by multiple authors. The companion shares traits with traditional academic genres but is neither a textbook nor a state-of-the-art collection of original essays on a specialized topic. I took this invitation to review Alfred Bendixen's A Companion to the American Novel to reflect on this popular genre's identifying features.

First, the editor may leave a stronger mark on a companion than on other sorts of edited book. Typically editors give contributors a pretty wide berth; it might even be said that the more successful an edited book on a specialized topic, the more its contents may surprise the editor. Producing a companion, however, requires the editor to do serious conceptualizing and mapping out of contents before even considering possible contributors. That is because companions are expected to provide “coverage” of a “field,” and the editor's job is to ensure that coverage. His or her conceptual map, created before soliciting the first contributor, often does more to determine the final product than with other edited books.

Alfred Bendixen's conceptual map for this Companion to the American Novel is elegant and smart. The six hundred-plus pages are divided into three sections of varying lengths. “Historical Developments” includes seven chapters while “Genres and Traditions” and “Major Texts” offer fourteen and sixteen respectively, indicating that literary history remains an important (but secondary) player as Bendixen defines the field of the American novel.

The “major texts” lineup contains few surprises, with the possible exception that The Road gets the final chapter. Bendixen has targeted novels frequently taught in colleges (and some also in high schools) – confirming that the companion's target audience is professors, teachers, and perhaps also students. (More precisely, those are the end-users, while the purchaser is assumed to be a library, given the price tag.) Bendixen's selections are canonical, even iconic – The Great Gatsby, The Scarlet Letter, and so on. African American novels are well represented (Invisible Man, Native Son, and Beloved), but the “major texts” selection as a whole does not push for a reconsideration of what counts as “major” – or, for that matter, of what counts as a “novel.” What would happen to a reader's understanding of “major texts” if, say, Cane, The Woman Warrior, The House on Mango Street, or Maus were included? These works that press generic definitions appear regularly on syllabi, too – perhaps more regularly than Portrait of a Lady or Moby-Dick, also included here. I raise this question not to fault Bendixen so much as to draw attention to the inherent conservatism of the companion genre.

“Genres and Traditions” does more to push the envelope. In addition to chapters on expected subgenres (such as gothic, sentimentalism, and historical romance), and chapters fulfilling the newer mandate for ample ethnic and other identity categories, Bendixen also includes a few surprises such as the short-story cycle, social-protest novels, and utopian fiction.

Since complete coverage of a field is never possible, the reader of any companion will invariably find things missing. For this reader, postmodernism seems underrepresented, not mentioned in the titles under “Historical Developments” (though Martha J. Cutter's chapter deftly connects post-1970 multiethnic literature with postmodernism) nor (depending on how one defines the term) even in the section on “major texts.” Realism seems, correspondingly, overrepresented. The transnational turn which has so dominated American studies in the past decade also conspicuously lacks a chapter, though several contributors deal incisively with that shift, most notably Andrew Warnes in his chapter on Native Son. Identity categories in general are well represented, though disability, a very hot topic, does not appear. Nor does the graphic novel.

As important in determining field coverage as the editor's role is conveying to contributors their charge. In particular, should contributors add something new to existing conversations about their subject? I think they should, if for no other reason than to justify the continuing production of new companions. On this point, Bendixen's Companion to the American Novel is uneven. While some contributors just synthesize current interpretations – and a few do little more than summarize major themes in primary texts – the strongest essays provide satisfying new angles of vision. Among others, Leonard Cassuto on crime fiction, Chip Rhodes on the reform novel, and even writers about such well-travelled novels as The Great Gatsby (Richard Lehan), Moby-Dick (Wyn Kelley), and The Sound and the Fury (Philip Weinstein) rise to the challenge of providing accounts accessible to the novice while also saying something original. Because of a number of such strong chapters, Bendixen's Companion deserves a spot on the bookshelf not only of the teacher but also of the scholar of the American novel.