Events, ever since the work of Alain Badiou, have been modish things. They are not, however, “things” at all, at least not quite; they are happenings, but not normal everyday ones; they are singular, inexplicable, contingent. They are breaking points and boiling points and bubblings over, to paraphrase Gilles Deleuze; they are unspeakable; they make everything different. Sebastian Huber, in his new book, makes a case for a desire for catastrophic or world-ending events in particular as inextricable from postmodern American culture, and, furthermore, that the “very concept of America, and particularly its literature … is inexorably intertwined to the idea of emphatic events, be they conceived as ‘beginnings,’ ‘ends,’ or otherwise” (1). Narrative both can and cannot hold them; in some readings, narrative exists because of them. Huber is interested in the ways in which this also holds true for our diminished and fraught notion of the subject – in his reading, pace Badiou, subjects are created by events. Just as events evade narrative, he argues, suggesting that the literature he is interested in “undermin[es] the need for narratives to mediate events at all” (3), subjects too are tricky, fugitive things, that can only be said to exist in their very inaccessibility. Building on what Fredric Jameson and others articulate as the death or dissolution of the subject, Huber's study seeks to understand how these two things might be interrelated: “Only through the subject can there be said to be an event. Only through an event can there be said to be a subject” (48).

Admirably lucid in its exploration of not just one potentially dense abstract idea but two, then, the book deftly unpacks some difficult material, and does a remarkable job of applying these ideas to the literature itself, illuminating both the philosophy and the texts it takes as its main examples. As such, this is an important intervention not only into literary criticism that deals with contemporary American fiction, but also, and perhaps primarily, into “event studies,” if there can be said to be such a thing. (As such, I wondered why it didn't cite an important recent work by Michael Sayeau.Footnote ¹) The book's intellectual and philosophical complexity is largely sublimated into clear-eyed and generous prose; only occasionally does the writing becomes marked by the effortful nature of the task at hand. The use of certain key terms at these moments becomes slightly wearisome, as in the pragmatic inelegance of the description of an event being continued “in its reagent points” (246). But the readings here are brilliant: the material on Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2006), and in particular chapters on Jess Walter's The Zero (2006) and Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day (2006), is at times revelatory, and in the latter case comprises an important milestone in the critical response to that novel. Huber argues for Against the Day’s specificity in Pynchon's oeuvre, mainly because in the novel “reagency is an ongoing process that does not require the subject's disappearance” (242) – unlike that famous exemplar of the postmodern dissolute subject, Tyrone Slothrop, who experiences dispersal as liberation into pure Being, Yasheem's status as a “subject of the event” is more ambivalent about anything that might be interpreted as transcendence. Instead, Huber argues for the subject's awkward persistence as a kind of becoming, best understood as “enjambment,” a figure that, while acknowledging the rhetoric of finality that has accrued around the subject, and not contradicting it, instead provides a sort of paradoxical continuity-in-incontinuity, a step away that is also a step onwards.

One of Badiou's greatest insights is the way in which the event – as he understands it, and as we, following him, now too inescapably understand it – necessitates a reimagining of the subject: a subject whose agency and coherence are, and must be, wholly created by the singular nature of that event. This is Huber's starting point: how to understand such a subjectivity, one that is allowed such a particular, and particularly limited, variant of agency? Huber rather audaciously shows how the representation (or nonrepresentation) of events is intermingled with instances of unexpected agency, an agency that has become transformed. This, then, is no call for, or hope of, a return to a nostalgic conception of the talismanic agentic subject, but instead a complex and nuanced argument, made through a series of brilliant close readings, that the reciprocity between subject and event now, surely, must have primacy. We are all, Huber convinces us, now subjects of events.