In her recent book Grotesque Relations: Modernist Domestic Fiction and the U.S. Welfare State, Susan Edmunds takes up for argument the presence of the “grotesque” in modernist domestic fiction. Edmunds coins the term “domestic exterior” to achieve the purpose of critically comprehending modernist domestic fiction through an analysis of the coming into being of the US welfare state. Edmunds achieves this objective by dissecting the triangular relationship between home, market, and the state in the twentieth-century US welfare state. Drawing from the archives of contemporary sociopolitical history, Edmunds argues how the state's distorted dealings with the domestic sphere “ended up transforming both the family and the state” (11). Taking up Bourdieu's concepts of “cultural capital” and “class habitus” as the central framework for her book, Edmunds draws out the contours of modernist domestic fiction. In doing so, she challenges the validity of the values propagated by the twentieth-century US welfare state.

The book, which is divided into six self-sufficient chapters, definitely succeeds in giving a kaleidoscopic vision of the several factors that influenced modernist domestic fiction in a variety of ways such as the maternalist reformers, the Villagers, the women's suffrage movement, celebrity culture and the concepts of “free love” and “body beautiful,” to mention a few. Edmunds takes up one writer from the modernist domestic fiction tradition in each chapter to guide the reader through the history of the making of the US welfare state and the “grotesque relations” it shares with the domestic sphere. Taking up Jean Toomer's Cane and Natalie Mann as points of reference, Edmunds deals with lynching and race relations in the US welfare state and establishes the creation of an antidomestic discourse in modernist fiction that runs parallel to the sentimental discourse. Edmunds discusses the effects of eugenics on modernist domestic fiction with relation to East European immigrant life in the US welfare state in her study of Edna Ferber's American Beauty.

One of the recurrent themes of the text is to decode the hypocrisy of the US welfare state, especially with respect to the peripherals in society. By placing survival over sentiment, Edmunds exposes the hollowness of the values advocated by the strategists of the US welfare state through her reading of Nathaniel West's The Day of the Locust. The presence of the “grotesque” in modernist domestic fiction is doubly ensured when Edmunds succeeds in establishing the connection between Dulles's and King's political programs and Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood.

The text, as a whole, is a critique of modernist domestic fiction within a set textual tradition. However, it would have been richer with a conclusion to the chapters. Nevertheless, it illuminates the reader on the contemporary social, political, and cultural norms of the US welfare state, and this makes it a valuable addition to the critical world. It is therefore apt to conclude that although it is not an easy read, Grotesque Relations is a must-read for scholars of modernist fiction as well as for those of the US welfare state.