Bloomsbury Academic Escape, Escapism, Escapology: American Novels of the Early Twenty-First Century

Escape, Escapism, Escapology: American Novels of the Early Twenty-First Century identifies and explores what is emerging as perhaps the theme of 21st-century American fiction: the desire to escape - from the present, from history, from the existential - at a time of inescapable globalization. The driving question is how to find an alternative to the world within the world, and at a time when utopian and messianic ideals have lost their power to compel belief. John Limon traces the American answer to that question in the writings of some of the most important authors of the last two decades―Chabon, Díaz, Foer, Eggers, Donoghue, Groff, Ward, Saunders, and Whitehead, among others―and finds that it always involves the contemporary utopian freedom or messianic salvation of childhood. He also places this American view of escape in relation to the oeuvres of world novelists David Grossman and Arundhati Roy, for whom experience always precedes the innocence that American authors strive to isolate, defend, usurp, and mobilize for their own projects. Radical escape, in the form of utopianism and messianism, as well as historical escape, most often from slavery or Nazism, haunts and provides the narrative impetus for the novels Limon examines, but always delivers characters to the inescapable globalism of the present and cannot save them from what they take to be the closing of the world frontier. Review If you haven’t yet encountered John Limon’s work, you have some exhilarating surprises ahead: it’s witty, keenly idiosyncratic, beautifully adroit at drawing unexpected connections, and spectacularly attuned to the evocative possibilities of both paradox and pathos. Escape, Escapism, Escapology: American Novels of the Early Twenty-First Century is a savvy examination of crucial obsessions in some of our most ambitious and canonical contemporary fictions, helping us through the problem of conceiving not only what we’re escaping from but also what we’re escaping to. The result is an argument that will compel both the ornithologists and the birds: one that our Michael Chabons will find as illuminating as our Stanley Cavells. --Jim Shepard, author of The Book of Aron About the Author John Limon is John Hawley Roberts Professor of English at Williams College, USA. He is the author of The Place of Fiction in the Time of Science (1990), Writing After War (1994), Standup Comedy in Theory (2000), and Death’s Following (2012).