According to Daniel Cordle, retrospect teaches us that the Cold War was a period defined by “things that did not happen and the cultural consequences of their not happening” (1), by the “extended anticipation” (2) of nuclear disaster rather than by disaster itself. While first-wave nuclear criticism in the 1980s focussed mainly on fictional representations of disaster, Cordle proposes that second-wave criticism should shift the spotlight to fictions of nuclear anxiety and suspense. He conceives this project as involving three tasks: rereading nuclear catastrophe texts for their depiction of pre-disaster suspense, re-examining postmodern literature for “the signatures of the nuclear presence in everyday life” (1), and reading texts published since the end of the Cold War that reflect upon the earlier period. Thus, in States of Suspense, the small group of texts discussed includes genre novels by Nevil Shute, Judith Merrill and Pat Frank; postmodernist classics by Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo and Tim O'Brien; and more recent works by Bobbie Ann Mason, Philip Roth and Jonathan Safran Foer. Cordle's critical object, heavily contextualized through his citation of related Cold War documents and influential theoretical formulations, is the “subtly felt anxiety” felt “unevenly and indirectly” throughout the period (116).

The project is sensible, clear and worthwhile; nonetheless, and to its author's credit, States of Suspense is an anxious book. Anxiety is its object, but it is also the relationship Cordle's text has with its own status as a work of twenty-first-century literary criticism. Justifications of methodology and contemporary relevance litter its pages, and Cordle returns again and again to the specific scope of his book, to the arbitrariness of his selections, and to what he is not doing as much as to what he is. In hermeneutic terms, he is careful not to offer any clear statement on whether the appearance of nuclear motifs is a function of the writing or the reading of texts, and he likewise refuses to propose any simple hypothesis on whether these texts are “constitutive or reflective” (10) of US nuclear culture. This methodological openness inevitably means that Cordle often struggles to pin down “the traffic between nuclear and other issues” (2). Nuclear tropes are sometimes read as metaphors for other concerns (and sometimes not); conversely, “non-specific motifs of anxiety” might (or might not) reveal a nuclear source. In addition, while Cordle admits that “the nuclear subject … reveals fundamental limitations to the realist mode” (7), he limits this observation to the discussion of fictional texts, hinting at but preferring not to fully address the challenges the nuclear offers to his own ability to speak and write about it in a critical manner.

Understood in this way, States of Suspense is interesting not only as a post-Cold War study but also as a kind of post-High Theory one. The questions its analyses provoke, and its anxieties about methodology, point toward the difficulty of historicist approaches more generally in dealing with a period which witnessed profound shifts in the human understanding of language and time. In this regard, the book would have gained something from an engagement with Derrida's essay on the nuclear condition, “No Apocalypse, Not Now,” and particularly with Paul Saint-Amour's recent work on “Total War,” which uses Derrida as a springboard for a rethinking of time (and anxiety) in the pre- and postwar periods. Although Cordle does not acknowledge this body of work, the second-wave nuclear criticism he proposes is indeed already upon us.