Pieter Vermeulen's Contemporary Literature and the End of the Novel: Creature, Affect, Form interrogates the continued ability of the novel form to explore subversive “forms of life” (4) in contemporary literary fiction, despite its declining cultural power. Whereas the traditional novel used its ideological power to support hegemonic institutions, in recent history the novel's ability to influence society has radically decreased due to dwindling readership and the rise of new media. Vermeulen does not, however, take the once popular view that this decrease in influence equates to the end of the novel; rather, he argues that the novel is now able to have a more modest, yet highly significant, impact on its readers, specifically through formal experimentation which allows the author to generate affects that have yet to be codified. Using the terminology and findings of recent theorists in psychology and studies in affect by literary critics, such as Ruth Leys and Rachel Greenwald-Smith, Vermeulen sees contemporary fiction as emptying the novel of the emotions which enacted its hegemonic programmes, to stimulate awkward and destabilizing affects that “dissolve the self-contained interiority of the individual and open it to new connections and recombinations” (8).Footnote ¹ Through a unique theoretical reading of Eric Santner and Erich Auerbach, Vermeulen also assesses the portrayal of the “non-non-human” or “creatural” life in recent literary texts to show that such formal recalibrations do not suggest immediate political or ethical alterations, but rather that the contemporary novel is “one site where the reorganization of human life that is underway in the early twenty-first century is being registered as an affect that remains to be captured” (152).

Chapter 1 interrogates the “uneasy persistence” of traditional novelistic structures in contemporary fiction, despite “programmatic declarations” (21) of the form's demise. Tom McCarthy's Remainder (2005) and David Shields's Reality Hunger (2010) are examined as representative texts showing that contemporary alternatives to the novel are still “shaped by” the form's “structure” (21). McCarthy's and Shields's attempts to nullify the novel's cultural power by emptying the form of psychological depth to create a neutral text inevitably fail due to the unavoidable emission of “awkward and discordant affects,” which are “an effect of the inability of literary works to fully contain the intensities they irresistibly unleash” (41, 8). Unable to access its quondam cultural power, yet offered no viable alternative to the novel form, such contemporary literature leads a “diminished form of (after)life” (22). A reading of Lars Iyer's essay “Nude in Your Hot Tub” (2011) is set against McCarthy and Shields to suggest that this “compromised” life can be “given shape” by the contemporary artists who set out to achieve a more subtle programme of “opening up the broad range of affects” that invoke new and unconventional modes of being (22, 44).

Vermeulen develops his innovative theory of “creatural life” in chapter 2 through a reading of J. M. Coetzee's late fiction. This life is a liminal existence, defined not by its physicality but by its “ontological vulnerability” (56) because it cannot be fully categorized as an animal, yet it is unable to detach itself from the human forms of life that once protected it. Vermeulen reads Coetzee as emphasizing the analogous relationship between “creatural” existence and the postmillennial novel by explicitly acknowledging the novelistic devices that sustained modern subjectivity in order to eradicate them from his fiction, creating a “post-novelistic space” (49) devoid of emotional and psychological depth. The suffering of the “creatural” afterlife within the form that once supported human existence exposes the inadequacy of the traditional literary conventions to protect postmillennial forms of being. Conversely, by eliminating the novel's codified responses to suffering, Coetzee creates “new modes of being and feeling” (49) by invoking uncomfortable affects, such as frustration. This exploration leads Vermeulen to highlight the similarities between allegory and the contemporary novel by examining the parallels between Coetzee's late fiction, Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel (1957) and Erich Auerbach's Mimesis (1953), concluding that Auerbach's depiction of the condition of allegory as the “breaking down” of “old cultural and social forms” (62) is conterminous with Coetzee's literary world at the end of the novel. This comparison between both forms is explored further in the book's coda, in which James Meek's texts are analysed.

Expanding the geographical and cultural scope of his study, chapter 3 assesses Teju Cole's Open City (2011) as part of the cosmopolitan literary tradition. Since the inception of modern cosmopolitanism in the works of Immanuel Kant the novel has been promoted as the ideal literary form for enacting cosmopolitan cultural, political and judiciary changes due to its ability to evoke empathy towards other nations and chart specific human atrocities throughout the globe. Cole's text, however, retraces a popular argument that cosmopolitanism cannot inspire transformation beyond the cultural realm and undermines literary cosmopolitanism's overreliance on aestheticism, showing that “empathy and intercultural understanding alone cannot achieve” changes to the material world (85, original emphasis). Instead, “cosmopolitan connectedness … can be achieved only beyond the end of the novel” (94). Unlike the earlier texts in this study, Cole does not abolish novelistic conventions to elicit a critique but implements a “dynamic disarticulation … collecting them without assembling them into a functioning novel world” (84–85). This is formally achieved by evoking the historical figure of the fugueur, a psychologically disoriented version of the popular cosmopolitan flâneur. Throughout the novel, the various cultural and political hues witnessed by the protagonist do not harmonize into a cosmopolitan unity; rather they amalgamate into a harsh cacophonous drone.

Vermeulen's appreciation of the formal nuances of postmillennial fiction advances contemporary scholarship beyond its current obsession with the literary content of transnational and post-9/11 texts. The shrewdly developed theory of the “creatural” bolsters his arguments surrounding the twenty-first-century novel's liminal status, underscoring the form's fragility but also the unorthodox modes of being and feeling that are still to be discovered in its afterlife. Vermeulen's insightful intertwining of the psychological, ontological and formal theories indicates not only that these categories should be further developed in literary studies, but also that critics of contemporary literature should strive to elucidate the many other unconventional formal experiments that permeate the world of contemporary literature.