Postmodernism in Pieces looks to redefine what postmodernism means in the field of literature, given that it “has come to be defined by the very phenomena it set out to demystify: language, whiteness, masculinity, heteronormativity, middle-class status, the academy” (1). Literary postmodernism, Mullins suggests, has been correctly seen as primarily interested in how social categories like gender, race, class and nation are formed and maintained through language. However, both language and social categories have wrongly been seen as abstractions, and postmodernism itself therefore as an elite practice unmoored from concrete realities. For Mullins, on the contrary, postmodernism is deeply and thoroughly materialist even as it pursues these interests. Indeed, to see language and categorization as somehow disconnected from the material world is a fundamental error, and an error which postmodern texts reveal as they demonstrate that social structures are not “ready-made” but are “continuously the products of material processes” (3).

This fascinating book emerges in the context of rising cross-disciplinary interest in neomaterialisms, and the “pieces” in its title refer in one sense to the everyday objects or “nonhuman actors” whose agency is traced in the works of literature discussed. Its four chapters apply a “flat” or non-anthropocentric ontology to readings of contemporary US fiction by Leslie Marmon Silko, Jonathan Safran Foer, Toni Morrison, Jonathan Lethem, John Barth, David Foster Wallace, Don DeLillo and Julia Alvarez. A particular theoretical touchstone is Bruno Latour's “actor-network theory,” especially as articulated in Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (2005), which fits Mullins's purposes as a materialism that emphasizes relations between the human and nonhuman (in Latourian “worknets”) in line with the relational nature of literature, rather than concerning itself primarily with “things-in-themselves.”

Fundamentally, Mullins argues that postmodern literature foregrounds the agency of nonhuman entities in the formation of human social structures. Rather than viewing identity categories as a priori and fixed and then deconstructing them as “artificial,” postmodernism's treatment of the material illustrates how complex and continual interactions of people and things construct the social, which is always “in process.” This might seem like a fine distinction at first glance, but Mullins is making an important point which comes into focus through the first chapter's discussion of Silko's 1977 novel Ceremony. In this novel the healing of Tayo's illness is not achieved either by the white doctors’ Western medicine or by the traditional Pueblo medicine of Ku'oosh, but by Betonie's ceremony, which incorporates objects like promotional railroad calendars alongside traditional ceremonial objects. Betonie's method heals because it recognizes that Tayo's identity is not a static essence to be recovered, but continually shaped by an eclectic range of cultural artefacts. The larger point being made here is that social identities are not abstractions. They are real rather than artificial, but their current reality is only temporary. In demonstrating this, then, postmodern texts underscore the creative, constructive aspects of human–nonhuman interactions.

Subsequent chapters centre around three more “orthodoxies” of postmodernist fiction: the ontological dominant (chapter 2), the use of language (chapter 3), and the concept of otherness (chapter 4). Mullins's approach is conceptually sophisticated and rigorously critically informed throughout, but I found the second and third chapters not entirely convincing in their radical claims for nonhuman agency and the materialism of language as “a thing apart from human use” (109). The difficulty, I believe, derived from a not quite thorough enough engagement with the question of how we differentiate (or reject the distinction) between a “thing-in-itself” and an object invested by humans with meaning – in other words, between the physical and symbolic existence of an entity. This slight weakness is perhaps related to the book's conceptual reliance on Latourian relational models over more object-oriented approaches such as those of Graham Harman, Timothy Morton, or Ian Bogost. To his credit, Mullins does recognize that his ambitious attempts “to theorize the possibilities of language, beyond the gravitational pull of human significance,” mean that his readings of Barth and Wallace may seem like “a stretch” (133).

As the fourth chapter returns to a focus on the primacy in postmodernism of “in-process” relationality (here as preceding a discourse of “otherness”), the book is once again on firm ground, and Mullins's analysis of how the baseball in DeLillo's Underworld mediates human interactions is particularly masterful. The concluding chapter, which contends that, despite its suffix, postmodernism is not an “-ism” – that in its resistance to static, transcendent, generalizing “knowledge” it also resists and rejects periodization – also makes this work a compelling contribution to debates around the “end” or “death” of postmodernism.