Judie Newman presents Fictions of America as an attempt to understand the relationship between twentieth-century American novels and globalization. Explaining that globalization can take many different forms, and is associated with topics as different as terrorism, transnationalism, empire, and corporatism, she explores fictions engaged with these diverse areas. Newman begins her study with two rewritings of The Scarlet Letter: Bharati Mukherjee's The Holder of the World, which links Puritan America and India; and John Updike's S, which uses the followers of the Indian guru Rajneesh to satirize America's dependence on Others for self-definition. She then moves on to Emily Praeger's critique of transnational adoption in Wuhu Diary, the commodification of the neo-slave and slave narrative as exemplified by Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, Henry Louis Gates's marketing of The Bondswoman's Narrative and Zora Neale Hurston's engagement with issues of appropriation and commodification in Their Eyes Were Watching God. Next, Newman examines David Bradley's The Chaneysville Incident, which engages with the relation of slavery to modernity and argues for the importance of local tale-telling. She then turns her lens to Peter Hoeg's Smilla's Sense of Snow, published in Danish but a best-seller in the US in translation, a novel with intrigues around Thule, the US air base in Greenland. Then Newman reads Cormac McCarthy's novel Blood Meridian as a critique of imperialism through his engagement with prehistory. She ends with Bharati Mukherjee's exploration of multiple possibilities of migration stories in Desirable Daughters.

The strength of the book lies is in its rich analysis of some of the texts, an analysis informed by current questions in cultural studies and theory. She reads Mukherjee's The Holder of the World, for instance, not simply as an attempt to fill the gap between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries through India – a space with which Hawthorne's family was intimately related – but also as a critique of the neohistoricist belief in the primacy of information. Similarly, her analysis of the paratexts of The Bondswoman's Narrative is exemplary in its attention to detail and its focus on the marketing of slavery and racial narratives in the contemporary US.

As a coherent argument about globalization, imperialism, or the relation of globalization to imperialism, the book unfortunately falls short. Perhaps this is inevitable given the disparate range of books as well as the issues the author attempts to deal with. The author admits as much in the introduction when she states that the book “follows ideas across textual sites which may seem heterogenous, in novels which consider the long chronology of globalisation, TNCs, data overload, human rights imperialism … militarism, spurious determinism …” (6). Globalization is at once a contemporary cultural phenomenon aided by high-tech, a synonym for nineteenth-century imperialism, and an engine of narratives of modernity and development. Because it is everything and nothing at once, any text can be studied under its rubric. Although the title promises to be about narratives of global empire, the book provides no argument about what such narratives are about. Likewise, there is no justification about why the author is dealing with “fictions of America.” And why do fictions of America only include one Canadian writer? What is particular about these fictions that make them different from, say, fictions of Europe or fictions of Britain? The conclusion attempts to tie the disparate chapters together and indeed makes a compelling argument about how the figure of the unclaimed child in transnational fiction critiques the idea of the national “family” and filiative patterns. However, while some of the chapters deal with this figure, the idea of the unclaimed child as a counter to national family is not the overarching argument of the book.

In recent years, questions of transnationalism, postnationalism and globalization have led to a wealth of critical works interrogating questions of nation. Houston Baker's transnational call for linking the US South with other plantation colonies in Turning South Again (2001), for instance, has been echoed by Paul Jay's advocacy of border studies in Contingency Blues (1997) and John Muthyala's study of America through transborder and hemispheric dimensions in Reworlding America (2006). There have also been excellent works in the nascent field of US empire studies such as Victor Bascara's Asian American-centered Model-Minority Imperialism (2006), Amy Kaplan's Spanish American-focussed The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture (2003) and Harilos Stecopolous's regional–imperial analysis Reconstructing the World (2008). A book like Fictions of America has the potential to speak to concerns of globalization as well as imperialism, but it falls short of the promise due to the divergent issues it deals with as well as its lack of historicity. As a collection of loosely connected essays informed by close textual analyses of a variety of literary works, however, it is to be lauded.