With Modernism and Mobility: The Passport and the Cosmopolitan Experience, Bridget Chalk has written a remarkable book. In it, she argues that studies focusing on transnational narrative have largely missed the impact of standardized documentation on modern identity and artistic expression. While Chalk could have focused on one of the many aspects of statistical record keeping that arose in the twentieth century (the regulation and standardization of birth, adoption, marriage, death, and burial certificates), she chose to concentrate on the passport because of the ways it defined nationality in an increasing international age. The effects of the passport are far reaching, argues Chalk, because its implementation not only inflects individuals and their interactions with the state but also shapes the aesthetics of modernism. Chalk backs up her ambitious claims by outlining the major effects the invention of the passport had on individual writers during the first decades of the twentieth century, then tackles the ways that those writers' narrative experiments intersected with the regulation of identity.

Each of Chalk's five chapters focuses on a different author and weighs differently the mechanics of the passport bureaucracy and how the systematization of identity influenced the writer and his or her craft. For some writers, such as D. H. Lawrence and Gertrude Stein, aligning one's identity with a single nationality constricted one's self-perception, for they both saw themselves as straddling more than one national identity. Chalk links this equivocation to their narrative experimentation. In her opening chapter, she reads D. H. Lawrence's Aaron's Rod alongside Lawrence's attempt to secure a British passport and asserts the narrative elements in Aaron's Rod previously perceived as careless become instead techniques to reveal the ways identity formation cannot follow the strictures of national definitions. Focusing on Stein's autobiographies, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and Everybody's Autobiography, Chalk discusses how Stein's perspective allows for a freedom of categories when the lens focuses on self but insists on a stable category when focused on others. The link between national identity and narrative experimentation works slightly less well in the discussion of Gertrude Stein, perhaps because being aligned with a single nationality seems to have caused Stein less anxiety than it did Lawrence.

Three of the chapters focus on how specific elements of identity—race, gender, and sexual preference—function in relation to the systematized identity required in a passport system. To my mind, these three chapters are the strongest. Chalk's study of Jean Rhys notes how passports allowed women to exist only as dependent or potentially dependent persons whose own nationality would always be based on their husbands'. Linking Rhys' portrayals of women to specific social structuring expands the view of Rhys' portrayals of women from the particular to the systemic, because it explains how categories of the female in universal identity systems foreclose women from establishing either independent or secure places. Chalk demonstrates this thesis by showing how in Good Morning, Midnight the fluctuations in plot development correspond to the implementation of official identities based on a masculinity that produces an unstable female identity.

Another chapter concentrates on the ways passport systems surveilled and regulated colonial and racialized bodies. Examining Claude McKay's Banjo and personal writing alongside immigration regulations, the analysis details the ways a racialized body in port cities constantly required the verification of documentation to establish and verify its existence. The institutionally imposed identity comes to blur the internal perception of self, with the “plotless” narrative in Banjo functioning as a metaphor for questions of identity in a culture that has systematized its racism through required travel documents.

Chalk's last chapter on gay border crossings in the 1930s provides yet another very distinct elaboration on the ways that socially eschewed identities cross normalized identity categories. In this chapter on Christopher Isherwood, Chalk argues that individuals eventually became inured to passport regulations and the fixed identities they demanded. Using Isherwood's Berlin Stories and his memoir, Christopher and his Kind, the analysis demonstrates how individuals developed strategies to elide national constraints, especially in Germany, where categories such as “gay” or “Jew” carried life-threatening consequences. Consistent with the rest of the book, this final chapter links specific life experiences and historical moments to the writer's narrative experimentation; Chalk contends that the layers of fictionality that mark Isherwood's characters are consonant with the strata of identity necessary for a gay man in Germany in the 1930s.

Despite its terrific strengths, the book has minor flaws. At times, as in her discussion of Jean Rhys, Chalk retreats from her large claims into lengthy close readings that can, at times, seem to extend beyond the range of the arguments. Further, while some of the chapters demonstrate direct correlations between the logistics of the passport, lived experience, and narrative technique, others, such as the chapters on Stein and Rhys, provide less direct correspondences. However, the slightly more tenuous connections seem to have more to do with how writers documented their lives and less to do with Chalk's research and writing. When a writer left a thick vein of diaries and correspondences, she exploits it. When a writer did not, she makes viable arguments from what is available. My final quibble is that the conclusion reads less as a conclusion and more like an embryonic sixth chapter on W. H. Auden. I would have appreciated a conclusion that coalesced the intriguing claims made in each of the five chapters.

These shortcomings, however, do not detract significantly from this timely work. Whereas many studies that bridge the realms of literary analysis, biography, and historical context create an awkward and slightly off-balance amalgamation, this examination is an unusually deft balance of historical background, thorough research, and insightful close reading. In Modernism and Mobility, Bridget Chalk creates a nuanced and deep reading of the connections between twentieth-century regulations of the body and the texts of those who were most impacted by increased physical monitoring. It is a complex and compelling book.