Beautiful Circuits is a challenging, engaging and often fascinating book. With his study Mark Goble sets out to demonstrate the varied ways that media technologies and the “mediums and materialities of communication” (8) are incorporated into and inform the strategies of early twentieth-century American writers and artists. He unearths some surprising connections that illuminate both canonical modernists and our wider understanding of what constitutes modernism.

Beautiful Circuits begins with an exploration of mediation and connectability in Henry James's late novels, and of publicity, identity and telephones in Gertrude Stein's autobiographies. Goble then considers the network of meanings that racialized the medium of recorded sound as they resonate in the work James Weldon Johnson and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and concludes with a reframing of the Objectivist impulse and the engagement between historiography and photography through readings of William Carlos Williams, George Oppen, Agee and Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and Charles Sheeler's art. On the way Goble also reveals the intricacies of the Telegraphic Romance genre, that incorporated telegrams and Morse code into love stories, explores the “database aesthetic” (285) of the WPA Index of American Design project, connects Blind d'Arnault in Willa Cather's My Antonia to the popular “Humanola” musical automaton and ends in the twenty-first century with Chris Jordan's 2005 Circuit Boards #2. Goble's study is careful not to elide the technological desires and media connections of modernism with the digital enthusiasms of our present day, but he does illustrate how wrong we are in some of our assumptions about the singularity of our contemporary media ecology.

There has been a wealth of recent interest in the interactions between modernism and new technologies, but these have, on the whole, offered medium-specific readings – of photography and cinema (Michael North, Camera Works (2005); Laura Marcus, The Tenth Muse (2008)), or wireless communication and radio (Todd Avery, Radio Modernism (2006); Debra Rae Cohen, Michael Coyle and Jane Lewty, Broadcasting Modernism (2009)), for example. Goble is concerned with media and their materiality, but in a broad and multiple way, and his study foregrounds key issues of communication, intimacy, information and relationships – relationships with technology but also “relationships made possible by technology” (12, original emphasis). The central thesis of this study is made clear at the start; for Goble modernism is “not just a response to the power of media technologies in the twentieth century,” and he offers the analyses of Beautiful Circuits as “a way of insisting that this power was already modernism's own” (3).

There are some downsides to this ambitious project. The selection of authors and works explored seems arbitrary – they are brought together by the term “modernism” and by their American nationality, but this is a vast field and there is a sense that Goble has chosen examples to serve specific moments of his argument without a coherent, overarching methodological frame for his selections. Goble's admission that his reading of Stein's autobiographical writings of the 1930s alongside Grand Hotel (MGM, 1932) depends on “the coincidence” (89) is a disarmingly honest, but also telling, one. The question of gender is also troubling here; although sexuality (in Stein and James) and race (in Fitzgerald and Johnson) feature in the discussion, gender is conspicuously absent. Indeed, in his introduction Goble talks of “any representation of sexuality, class, or race” (12) and “experiences of sexuality, racial identity, class, and history” (19) as effacing gender entirely. This is a problem, not because studies of modernism or American literature should cover all the stock categories of difference, but because Goble fails thereby to explore, or even fully acknowledge, the gendered power relations of techno-mediation which were at the heart of the emergence of new media in the early twentieth century. Similarly, the only woman writer dealt with to any extent is Stein, and this reinforces the overall impression that, convincing as Goble's analyses and conclusions are, they offer only a partial account of modernist relationships with, on, and through technology. However, there is much to admire in this study and much to learn from it. Beautiful Circuits refuses to rest on accepted narratives about technologically inflected modernist texts, and instead delineates an intriguing network of connections, proximities and intimacies in the encounters between American modernism and modern media.