Novels of Democratic Exhaustion

A shared effort to make the US live up to its democratic promises was a regular feature of twentieth-century US fiction. Authors often wrote of the continuation of this endeavor, even in the face of disappointment, as the responsibility of an epic “us”—a national readership that was asked to participate in the ongoing quest. Contrastingly, in many very recent US novels, the collective pursuit of democratic redemption, however uncertain, no longer makes sense as a way to organize a narrative. This essay discusses contemporary novels including Ling Ma’s Severance (2018), Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half (2020), Asali Solomon’s The Days of Afrekete (2021), and Vanessa Veselka’s Zazen (2011), books that depict collective attempts to recover US democracy or make it anew as irrelevant or useless, while individual efforts to keep going in the face of crisis portend no brighter future. These narratives map the terrain of our contemporary democratic crisis, a crisis to which it is difficult to envision a solution. Not merely documents of defeat, these books also sharpen our desire for a different future, and they suggest that in seeking to narrate our way out of contemporary crises, we may need to imagine possibilities beyond the bounds of US democracy.Considered together, the books discussed here … map the terrain of our contemporary democratic crisis, a crisis to which it is difficult to envision a solution.