Waste studies has emerged in the past few years as a fascinating new field of interdisciplinary inquiry, employing insights from a range of different disciplines (anthropology, sociology, philosophy, archaeology, material-culture studies) to elucidate complex systems of waste production and management and critically reflect upon their implication in culture and society. Amongst a number of recent critical interventions in the field, the work of literary scholars is remarkable: following important contributions by Susan Signe Morrison and Christopher Schmidt, Rachele Dini now pursues the concept of waste and its manifestations in modern and contemporary anglophone writing.Footnote ¹

In Consumerism, Waste, and Re-use in Twentieth-Century Fiction, Dini argues that “commodities and waste exist on a Möbius strip; that they are shown to be dialectically inseparable from one another; and that under capitalist exchange relations, each is revealed capable of being alchemised into the other” (4). Thus for Dini (and the writers she examines), waste objects are more than mere matter: symptomatic of the capitalist systems that assign and abnegate value, they also divulge whole narratives about life under capitalism. As the principal narrative genre, the novel is central to Dini's concerns and the fundamental premise of her critique is that the writers she discusses “use waste to say interesting things about capitalism and to do interesting things to the novel form” (17). She argues that their novels evince a critique of capitalism that is inextricable from the subversion of realism, and both taken together attest to the persistence of a surrealist project, which challenged bourgeois values through an emphasis on waste.

The opening sections of the book employ comprehensive analyses of works by Giorgio de Chirico, André Breton, and Mina Loy to make the case for the importance of waste to literary surrealism. As material obstacles to sense-making systems, waste objects further the surrealist endeavour of interrogating a prevailing rationalism: “The historical avant-garde,” Dini writes, “challenges realist conventions to focus, instead, on non-events and useless objects that underscore reality's resistance to rationalisation” (35).

Subsequent chapters on Samuel Beckett and postmodernist writers like Donald Barthelme and J. G. Ballard demonstrate that they extend and complicate this project and “show waste to be a tenuous category that underscores the tenuousness of capitalism's ascriptions of worth” (138). Dini's excellent chapter on Don DeLillo's Underworld (1997) focusses on how it may be employed for aesthetic, political, or personal ends both radical and reactionary: “DeLillo's investigations of language and form wrest order and signification from waste,” she writes (175). The work closes with an examination of three recent novels by Thomas Pynchon, Jonathan Miles, and Tom McCarthy. From lucrative urban recycling contracts to high-priced scrap metal on its way by the boatload to China, it would seem that in our current neoliberal context waste is far too easily folded back into moneymaking systems and capitalist discourse to ever find critical traction outside them. Consequently, in these recent narratives, waste is “something simultaneously all pervasive and ineffable” – and, in contrast to the radically disruptive waste of de Chirico and Breton, politically rather inert (182).

In Dini's work, therefore, we witness the emergence of waste as a preoccupation among surrealist writers in the early 1900s, watch it bloom in Beckett, penetrate postmodern narratives of the 1960s and 1970s, obsess DeLillo, and finally influence recent novels of the neoliberal era. It is a fascinating story of how waste, which initially held much political and aesthetic charge, became an increasingly difficult critical tool to wield once modern life was utterly saturated by it, and Dini narrates her tale carefully, attentive to the major turning points that inflect the employment of waste by a tradition of writers.

It is a tradition of prominent, mostly white (and indeed mostly male and heterosexual) writers Dini considers, however, and it seems like rather a missed opportunity not to consider how waste might have been treated in the innovative works of nonwhite writers who were also cognizant of surrealist interventions. Given the contiguity between slave labour and Zygmunt Bauman's notion of “human waste,” a concept Dini is fond of discussing, which denotes the populations that were by-products of modernity's order building and economic progress, and indeed given the fundamental role that slaves played in the development of the commodity form that Dini frequently evokes, one wonders how waste is configured and mobilized in the works of African American writers that have inherited the legacy of that tradition.Footnote ² The ruins of Harlem in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952), the excrescent blackness of the Breedloves in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye (1970), the scatological landscapes of Samuel Delany's Hogg (1995): what function does waste serve in these narratives? What role does it play, formally and politically? Turning a keen, critical eye like the one Dini displays in this monograph towards writers of colour may indeed demonstrate that, pace Pynchon, McCarthy, et al., there is a great deal of power and political potential left in the literature of waste.