Driven by an appreciation that globalization works to erode natural borders and states of rest, Aliki Varvogli's Travel and Dislocation in Contemporary American Fiction finds in the fluid experiences of twenty-first-century life a way of linking together her readings of a broad range of recent US fiction. In a book that puts well-known novelists like Dave Eggers, Amy Tan, Jonathan Safran Foer and Jhumpa Lahiri alongside some less familiar fiction by Dinaw Mengestu and Chang-rae Lee, Varvogli focusses on representations of travel and dislocation and uses these themes to shape an elegant account of the shifting contours of contemporary narrative. At issue are questions about the nature and meaning of the national tradition itself and the ambition to understand “the extent to which our understanding of the American in American literature has evolved” in the age of globalization (xv), an approach that opens out a whole series of insightful readings of her chosen texts. Of all of these, the interpretations of Eggers's What Is the What and You Shall Know Our Velocity are particularly strong, exploring the limits of his metafictional method and situating that analysis in relation to displacement, imperialism and power. Beyond that, the analysis of What Is the What goes on to offer some potent observations on the relationships between Eggers's act of literary ventriloquism and the patterns of nineteenth-century slave narratives in terms that raise wider questions about nationhood. The same insight is applied to Lahiri. While rightly critical of the “author's sense of cultural entitlement” (130), it is Varvogli's understanding of Namesake as a novel that “rejects the conventional teleological ending of the immigrant novel” in favour of a future that “will make roots of routes” (137) that not only establishes a suggestive way of rereading the novel, but gives Travel and Dislocation its resonant peroration.

In broader terms, central to the book's success is the elegance of its conception, a design that allows Varvogli to take one of the major problems facing any attempt to offer a wide-ranging account of contemporary American fiction and turn it into her central theme. In her awareness of the porosity of national borders and her understanding of ways in which so many writers might be linked to both the American national tradition at the same time as they are connected with other contexts (some national, some not), she illuminates some of the complexities of globalization itself. The result is a book about contemporary American fiction that converts its understanding of the limits of such a category into a key part of its conceptual apparatus in terms that energize its reading of its chosen texts. Published as part of Routledge's Transnational Perspectives on American Literature, a series edited by Susan Castillo of works that share a common interest in the cultural and linguistic permeability of the United States in the age of globalization, Travel and Dislocation in Contemporary American Fiction adds to this debate with nuanced readings of recent American fiction that come together to create a searching account of the plural nature of selves, nations and cultures at the start of the twenty-first century.