This is a collection of Michael Keren's essays on a sweeping range of contemporary novels, including, but not limited to, Cormac McCarthy's The Road, Anosh Irani's The Cripple and His Talismans, Sayed Kashua's Let It Be Morning, David Grossman's To the End of the Land, and Margaret Atwood's Orynx and Crake. Separately, each of the essays offers subtle and thoughtful insights into the political era in which we live. Together, they offer a reflection on the nature, sources, and limits of political knowledge.

Keren adopts an aesthetic approach to reading literature which assumes that there is always a gap between what is represented in the novel and the form that representation takes. That gap, according to Keren, is the location of politics. As he puts it, “political reality does not exist in an a priori way; it comes into being only through the process of representation” (12). Keren's defense of an aesthetic approach comes at a time when literary critics have moved away from it. Instead, they often look at novels through an ideological lens. Keren does not read novels as their authors’ political manifestos nor as artifacts of their historical circumstances. To do so would reduce a novel to an idea or a mere morality tale. This would strip the work of its aesthetic value and, as a consequence, its political import.

Keren offers two reasons, one intellectual and one pedagogical, for his turn to literature for political wisdom. In the introduction, he offers a brief intellectual biography. As a graduate student in political science in the early 1970s he was steeped in the social science theories that sought to cure social ills with rigorous methodology and empirical research. “The cybernetic model of society, concerned with the social system's open exchange with its environment, was appealing because it promised solutions to social problems on the basis of fresh knowledge rather than old politics and corresponded to the preference of many for apolitical redesigns of society” (5). Keren realized that this cybernetic model of society and other social science theories were explanatory only as long as the political systems were working. As the twentieth century came to an end, the optimism which had fueled the social sciences diminished in the face of complex, contingent problems. Predictions made by social scientists turned out to be wrong. Although the social sciences continued to flourish, Keren and many others recognized that alternative and various sources of knowledge were required for deeper, more nuanced insight. Literature proved to be an important source of such knowledge.

The early twenty-first century has seen a proliferation of previously unimaginable communication technologies that have profoundly altered our social systems. Under these unprecedented conditions Keren turns to Cormac McCarthy's The Road for guidance in traveling in our new digital world. The Road chronicles the journey of a father and son along mountainous back roads to America's southern coast. The novel takes place after an unexplained disaster that has left grey ash covering the land and veiling the sun. The harsh, unforgiving physical conditions have transformed the few human beings who survive into cannibals. Father and son endure cold, hunger, and fatigue in this desolate world, struggling to retain their humanity. The Road takes place after the complete destruction of economic, political, and moral systems. Under such circumstances, social science theories are unable to explain the human condition. In “Absurdity and Revolt in Cormac McCarthy's The Road,” Keren argues that McCarthy's novel is an updated consideration of Camus's notion of absurdity and revolt. Central to Camus's understanding of the absurd is the effort to attribute meaning to a world even as that meaning continues to escape us. In the wake of the destruction caused by World War II, Camus encouraged his readers to resist illusory religious and political doctrines. Such a revolt would give value to life. Keren identifies the threads of that revolt woven into McCarthy's novel: the transience of life, the precedence of existence over essence, the refusal to substitute storytelling about reality for reality, and a commitment to succeeding generations. Keren observes that the communication technologies are accompanied by redemptive rhetoric much like the political ideologies that Camus warned us against. The Road “makes us aware of the need to evaluate every step we take on the road of life in terms of the degree of consciousness we maintain” (67).

Keren's second, pedagogical reason to seek political knowledge in literature was “the need to reach out to inquisitive young people” (8). As world travel became easier, students were exposed to new forms of relations between human beings and between humans and nature. Keren appreciated that they were looking for new ways to understand the ever-changing diversity of political life. He credits his students with introducing him to the novels under consideration in the volume. Literature allows for a new perspective on reality by temporarily transcending it and it reveals hidden dimensions of political life that may elude empirical research.

“The Quest for Identity in Sayed Kashua's Let It Be Morning” illuminates the complexities of political life, which are sometimes obscured by the social sciences’ tendency to abstract and to categorize. Let It Be Morning is the story of a young Arab journalist at a Hebrew newspaper who, exhausted by life in a big city, returns to his hometown, an Arab village within the state of Israel. Knowing that the world is in flux, the first-person narrator also knows that he cannot really retreat to his childhood home. He tells us, “I'm going home, to a new place.” The new place is increasingly marked by the tensions between Arab and Jewish citizens of Israel. Keren argues that Kashua's great achievement is to complicate our present political discourse about Israel's Arab minority, which was largely inspired by Edward Said's politics of victimhood. Contemporary discourse describes a world divided between perpetrators and victims. The novel transcends this dichotomy and the generalization that dichotomy demands, allowing us to meet individuals who reveal new insights to political life.

Keren also notices the novel's capacity to foster certain intellectual habits that are much in demand in politics. Drawing on Milan Kundera, he explains: “Outside of the novel, we're in the realm of affirmation: everyone is sure of his statements: the politician, the philosopher, the concierge. Within the universe of the novel, however, no one affirms: it is the realm of play and hypotheses. In the novel, then reflection is essentially inquiring, hypothetical” (10). The essays in this volume demonstrate that reading novels encourages moderation in the knowledge we already have. It is when we are uncertain, yet open, that we gain new political wisdom.