In the book’s afterword, I suggest that the period studied in this book has drawn to a close, as literary liberals have become both less interested in responding to postmodernism and more interested in rejecting free-market politics, including the centrist, communitarian version of this politics. To illustrate this shift, I compare texts published on either side of the 2008 financial crisis. In Then We Came to the End (2007), Joshua Ferris experiments with a collective first-person narrator in order to dramatize the tensions of office life, tensions which he figures in terms of the oppositions between elitism and egalitarianism and between sincerity and irony. Ferris’s self-reflexive interest in forging empathetic connections between workers, bosses, readers, and writers makes his novel a quintessential post-postmodern text. Philipp Meyer’s American Rust (2009) and Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs (2009) by contrast, are precisely the kind of “angry” books “about work” that Ferris rejects. In formally distinct ways, both novels offer a political vision skeptical of centrism and committed to the irreducibility of class as a source of political and economic conflict.

My second chapter begins with a comparison of Jonathan Franzen and Ben Marcus, two writers who embody the competing aesthetic visions of contemporary “realists” and “experimentalists.” Focusing on their work and their high-profile debate about literary difficulty, I argue that their mutual commitment to their “community of readers” (as Franzen puts it) and to narratives of “the family gone wrong” (as Marcus puts it) actually points to a shared social vision, a vision in which “family” values are more important than aesthetic and political antagonisms. This focus on the family also cuts across the oppositions central to contemporary American politics, I show, and it informs the fiction and criticism of writers like Jeffrey Eugenides, Aimee Bender, and George Saunders. This domestic turn is figured, in several of these texts, as a revision of both American individualism and postmodern impersonality. I make the case that this triangulating impulse generates a range of formal innovations, from Eugenides’s re-invention of “the marriage plot” to Marcus’s self-reflexive blending of experimental impersonality and post-postmodern “emotionality.”

In this chapter, I show how Richard Powers’s 1998 novel Gain symbolically resolves the conflict between transnational corporate “stakeholders” and shareholders. In this way, the novel reveals what is already implicit in such “non-governmental” movements as “stakeholder activism,” which flourished during the 1990s in response to the rise of transnational corporations and right-wing critiques of the state. These non-governmental movements imagine a political field structured not by antagonism but by a plurality of interests, and they assume that these interests can be recognized and coordinated by a government (elected or corporate) that can somehow stand outside this realm of interests. I conclude this chapter by contrasting Gain’s post-political vision, as I call it, with that of Colson Whitehead’s Apex Hides the Hurt (2006), a novel about a “nomenclature consultant” hired to rename a small town. The novel’s resolution stages a rejection of the impulse to allow profitability to drive governance, and the discordant historical name selected by the protagonist — “Struggle” — also names the very thing hidden by corporate governance and non-governmental politics.

This introduction offers an extended reading of David Foster Wallace’s 2000 foray into political journalism, “Up, Simba,” which illustrates what will be the central claim of this book: that literary post-postmodernism is best understood as the means by which left-leaning writers negotiate the neoliberal turn — a version of, rather than an alternative to, this new consensus. To make that case, I trace connections between the communitarian logic of the so-called New Sincerity, the form of post-postmodernism most closely associated with Wallace, and the interventions of Bill Clinton and the New Democrats, who rejected key New Deal principles in favor of a "third way" between liberalism and conservativism. This introduction also historicizes "postcritique" and the various "post-ideological" accounts of neoliberal culture, accounts which, in my view, reproduce contemporary liberalism’s ambivalence about the free market and free-market politics, and therefore can be understood as symptomatic of the very changes they seek to interpret.

Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange (1997) parodies the North American Free Trade Agreement, but it characterizes the fight over free trade in the same terms as NAFTA’s liberal supporters, who represent this fight as a struggle between “zero-sum nationalism” and an emerging network of transnational “enterprise-webs.” Just as NAFTA’s supporters imagine a global free market comprised solely of “human capital,” Yamashita imagines an "expanding symphony" comprised solely of "conductors" attuned to transnational complexity -- a vision which depends on a disavowal of the structural differences that make such collectives possible. Sesshu Foster’s Atomik Aztex (2005), meanwhile, suggests that framing the conflicts faced by Mexican migrants as epistemic conflicts is a mistake. His novel imagines an alternative history in which the “Aztex” defeated the Spanish and non-Western cultural and epistemic values have triumphed, but the violence of exploitation remains. At the same, Foster’s novel ultimately suggests that migrant workers can create the possibility of an “alternative future” by embracing a vision of a world defined by class antagonisms rather than by epistemic conflicts.

This chapter explores texts that articulate the differences and continuities between Reaganite neoliberalism, as represented by Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, and Clintonian neoliberalism, as represented in Clinton’s own speeches, Joe Klein’s Primary Colors, and the work of Mary Gaitskill. Clinton’s defense of welfare reform attaches a therapeutic rationale to right-wing ideals like “personal responsibility," and we see this same logic in in Gaitskill’s post-feminist interventions into ‘90s-era debates about female masochism and campus sex codes. We also see how this personalizing logic resolves political conflict in her novel Two Girls, Fat and Thin, in which what could be understood as an ideological disagreement about capitalism — the tension between a left-leaning journalist and a follower of a thinly-veiled version of Ayn Rand — proves to be a product of the two women’s failure to take "responsibility" for their own emotional experiences. In this chapter, I also examine how the logic of welfare-reform is contested by novels like Richard Price’s Clockers and Sapphire’s Push, both of which seek to demystify the “workfare” state’s idealization of legal, low-wage work.

This essay reads Lydia Maria Child and Henry David Thoreau against the grain of the usual literary taxonomies in order to consider the degree to which two key preoccupations animated their respective work: first, What constitutes a good life and how might people of limited or moderate means achieve it within a volatile and unforgiving US economy? And, second, How might individuals conceive of and act on their responsibilities to suffering others, especially enslaved Americans, and what should one’s disposition be toward injustice more generally? With attention to their overlapping inquiries into frugality, self-improvement, economic instability, and social injustice, I argue that Child and Thoreau are crucial authors for understanding both the mid-nineteenth and the early twenty-first centuries.