On Endings: American Postmodern Fiction and the Cold War by Daniel Grausam is driven by a central question: “What does narrative look like when the possibility of an expansive future has been called into question?” (5). Grausam suggests that the specter of mutually assured destruction “changed authors' conceptions of historical time” (5). This change, and the new relationship of author to historical time, is examined throughout the book via discussion of time and its relationship with the narrative of nuclear holocaust. On Endings covers a range of authors and texts including John Barth, Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo. Like many books that examine themes of America in the Cold War period, On Endings is seemingly preoccupied with how the threat of thermonuclear war influences a text's meaning in relation to this question. It is this threat that Grausam sees as central to the way narrative is produced and received in America and he shows how the conception of time in narrative is “intertwined with the history of the nuclear age” (7). It is through this connection that Grausam accomplishes one of his set aims, which is to reveal substantial connections between two of postmodernism's most respected theorists: Linda Hutcheon and Frederic Jameson.

Grausam suggests that the argument of the book looks to points of connection between Hutcheon's view of “the postmodern as eminently historicist” and Jameson's argument that it is depthless. Much of this text reconciles these two points through a deep examination of several texts from the postwar period. As Grausam notes, his main argument is “that the historiographic complexity of postmodern fiction is a representation of, and an attempt to come to terms with, a radically changed understanding of historical time that potentially makes historical consciousness impossible” (7). In triangulating his argument (and the book that follows) in this way Grausam can examine the temporality of the nation in his selection of texts while reconciling the apparent disparity in Hutcheon's and Jameson's views on the postmodern.

In chapter 3, “The Time of the Nation, the Time of the State,” Grausam places Robert Coover's The Public Burning (1977) under the meticulous gaze of his theoretical matrix. Grausam puts forth a reading of the text that asks “whether the view of history that the novel professes … might itself be seen as a very specific historical response to a crisis of temporality” (62). This reading subverts many of the conventional readings of the text that are not predicated on a strict interpretation of the novel's “historical and metaphysical revision” (62). Rather Grausam dissects “the deconstruction of realist historical reference … cast in sharply historicized terms” by an examination of the “temporality of nation in Coover's novel” (62). It is through examining this temporality and its connections to America's views on communism that Grausam connects The Public Burning with the 1952 film High Noon. Grausam notes that the film is a consistent presence in the novel. This connection creates a vast intertextual relationship between Coover's work and the film. By examining the relationship of a film with a book Grausam can posit that the many symbols of time in the film and the book are “centrally concerned with the idea of a countdown” and with the possibility that there is a futureless America possible in these texts and, during the Cold War, in the real world as well (70). On Endings provides a unique perspective on the relation of time and history to postmodernism. In his text Grausam identifies many of the key ideas in this field and through an examination of several texts provides some new ways to think about this crucial relationship.