In the final paragraph of his book, Stuart Scheingold reiterates his central claim that “one key to understanding the complexities introduced by the circumstances of the twenty-first century would be an inquiry into novels” (p. 224). He nevertheless notes “the shortcomings of [his] research—shortcomings which are always part and parcel of honest and intellectual exchange. This is especially the case … in a venture that reaches across the contested intellectual terrain that tends to put literary, historical, and political modes of inquiry at odds with one another” (p. 225). It is, perhaps, unfortunate then that despite his awareness of the problems of using the literary to think about the political, Scheingold fails to engage them in a meaningful way. As a result, The Political Novel remains something of a missed opportunity rather than a convincing account of the ways in which the novel might—as he believes it can—help us to reconceptualize the past in order that we might think and act more productively in the future.

Scheingold situates his book as a response to Irving Howe's seminal Politics and the Novel (1957). On Scheingold's reading, Howe sees the political novel as celebrating those who act heroically on behalf of ideals that are forever out of reach. “In the final analysis,” he writes, “Howe puts his faith in politics and honors novelists who believe that in the long run political action will somehow be successful” (p. 11). Scheingold, on the other hand, believes that the novels most reflective of the twentieth century are those that he labels “novels of political estrangement,” texts which “engage not with political processes and institutions but instead with those who are subjected to, but have little or no say in the decisions made by authoritative agencies on their behalf—and too often at their expense” (p. 1). By understanding estrangement as the fundamental political experience of the twentieth century, Scheingold suggests, we will be better placed to act differently in the twenty-first. He offers readings of several novels that he believes illustrate the types of political estrangement with which he is concerned.

Obviously there is something of a confirmation bias here. Drawing heavily on the work of Tony Judt, Scheingold asserts that political estrangement is the most pressing problem of modernity, and then offers readings of novels that are said to depict such political estrangement. Thus, not only are novels that do not support this thesis discounted from his analysis, but so are possible alternative readings of the novels that he does discuss. The problem of confirmation bias does not, of course, mean that he is necessarily wrong in his diagnosis of modernity's malaise, nor that novels of political estrangement are not the most important political novels of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, it does suggest that the author needs to work harder to establish the veracity of his insights, not least because the manner in which we read novels undoubtedly shapes what we take from them. His failure to do so is a major weakness of the book.

Scheingold's claims about the malaise of modernity and the role of the literary imagination in allowing us to see it would, perhaps, be more convincing if his approach to the texts were less reductive. Unfortunately, however, he simply offers a basic summary of a novel's plot line, and then briefly identifies the ways in which it supports his broader claims. Thus, the very richness that the literary imagination is supposed to bring to our understanding of politics is reduced, like the novels themselves, to a simple take-home message. This is suggested by the frequency of the phrases “When all is said and done” (pp. 34, 72, 93, 163, 202) and “in the end” (pp. 115, 128, 211) or variations thereof (pp. 82, 120, 210) in his discussion of the lessons offered by a particular text. Indeed, his approach is so deflationary of the experience of what it means to read a novel that on several occasions, the insights that a given text or group of texts is said to offer about modernity are offered in the form of bullet points (pp. 36, 50–51, 96–97, 112, 188–89).

It may be, however, that Scheingold's problematic approach to textual readings arises, in part, from the sheer number of texts that he has chosen to discuss. Beginning with Franz Kafka's The Trial and ending with Ian McEwan's Saturday, Scheingold provides readings of 27 novels by 25 different authors in a book whose main body of text is only 225 pages long. As such, there is insufficient space for any single reading to develop beyond the simple plot summary that he offers. Had the author chosen to focus on a fraction of the texts he discusses, then it might have been possible for him to develop his central thesis more convincingly, perhaps explaining more fully why he had chosen one novel over another, or prioritized a particular reading. He does explain that the novels he discusses “are of widely recognized literary merit—the literary imagination at its best” (p. 24). This is, however, simply asserted rather than demonstrated. Indeed, as Scheingold's chronological approach to literature nears its end, he seems to rely rather too heavily upon Michiko Kakutani, literary critic for the New York Times, as the arbiter of what is of value in contemporary literature. Certainly, one might take exception to the suggestion that the didacticism of Bernard Schlink's The Reader or Zadie Smith's overpraised White Teeth constitute the literary imagination at its best; then again, one might not, but there is simply no space within Scheingold's approach for such discussions to take place.

In his conclusion, Scheingold is right to note the difficulties involved in using literature to talk about politics. The shortcomings of his book have, however, little to do with the intellectual territoriality that he identifies as a stumbling block to such analysis, and more to do with the overly ambitious nature of his own enterprise. Rather than seeking to establish the veracity of his claims through the figurative weight of the small library of texts under discussion, the author would have been better-off presenting the theoretical foundations of his approach in more detail before turning to richer, more nuanced—and more theoretically informed—readings of a few select novels. For while it could plausibly be argued that novels might allow us to reconceive of the past in a manner that is productive for the future, one would not be justified in drawing such a conclusion from the arguments presented in this book.