Has the future become a thing of the past? This idea can be glimpsed in virtually any area of society and culture today—from the self-serving musings of Silicon Valley gurus and sarcastic internet memes (“Where’s my hoverboard?”), to the foreboding pronouncements of historians, literary critics and contemporary novelists. Whether the tone is ironic, nostalgic, oracular, or befuddled, all voice the same refrain: the future no longer orients our temporal imaginary. Technological innovations (the “digital age”), economic transformations (the “new economy”) and various social utopias (the “global 1960s”) have failed, and we live in the shadow cast by their absence—the perpetual, homogenizing immediacy of an endless Now.

In a rich and bracing new study of recent American fiction, How to Read a Moment: The American Novel and the Crisis of the Present, Mathias Nilges reconsiders this crisis of futurity—not because the broad consensus sketched above is mistaken, exactly, but rather because it misunderstands the problem. For Nilges, Fredric Jameson offers the central, if ultimately limited, elucidation: in an age unable to think historically, we are stuck in “a present without a past or future” (33).1 The “end of temporality” is a symptom of late capitalism’s fully global expansion, its eradication of alternative spaces and synchronization of uneven temporalities into its all-encompassing system.2 Of course, it is hard not to see this as a story of cultural exhaustion. For Jameson, late capitalism forecloses modernism’s open-ended, multi-layered grappling with temporal duration. For others, such as Jonathan Arac, it marks the end of novel’s significance as a literary form.

How to Read a Moment proposes an important alternative to this pervasive critical attachment to endings. Building on Jameson, Nilges reads the collapse of the future historically, as the symptom of an economy increasingly oriented around the instantaneous circulation of finance capital. This new stage of what he calls, following Mark McGurl, “real-time capitalism” (52), erodes the collective ability to think temporality as duration—that is, as anything other than a recurring series of immediate, present instants.3 Nilges here offers a crucial intervention. He argues that the present crisis, which is a crisis ofthe present as a temporal category, is better understood in terms of historical transition to a “new temporal regime,” rather than mere obsolescence. Far from a literary dead-end, or a merely reflexive, formal repetition of once-innovative modernist gestures, the contemporary novel’s engagement with time is more varied—conceptually, artistically, politically—than critics have realized. Temporal crisis in fact provides the basis of the contemporary novel’s vitality in the twenty-first century: “the crisis of futurity appears not as an endpoint to literature,” Nilges insists, “but instead reveals itself as a common point of departure for the work of literature” (20). While everyday life today is marked by an attenuation of future imaginaries, contemporary fiction orients us in a moment of social transition by making time legible, offering readers a critical knowledge of time itself as a historical and social product.

This argument initially coalesces around a reading of Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis (2003), a novel whose basic conceit—a banker caught in traffic in the middle of New York City—stages the purported end of historical temporality almost too perfectly. Nilges’s study spins out from there to a wide range of contemporary novels by DeLillo, Ben Lerner, Rachel Kushner, Jennifer Egan, Gary Shteyngart, Charles Yu, Matt Johnson, Colson Whitehead, Kiese Laymon, Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, William Gibson and others. The linchpin in the account of these authors’ disparate engagements with narrative time is an unlikely source: the German Zeitroman, or time novel. Most famously associated with Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (1924), the Zeitroman is a modernist out-growth of the social novel; it “traces a temporal logic of an epoch” (18). Though it may appear antiquated, Mann’s particular theorization of the Zeitroman hinges on a distinction that Nilges believes to be crucial today: between “time itself” (a formal concept) and time as it is experienced by individuals (a phenomenological concept). The latter forms the basis of western philosophical accounts of temporality, and underpins the work of the Anglophone modernists most associated with the time novel in English: Joyce, Woolf and Faulkner. Yet Nilges argues that approaching time only as a dimension of subjective experience misses what’s most valuable about narrative fiction today: time’s importance as a form of critical, historically situated knowledge about the world.

Each chapter of How to Readunpacks a particular conceptual move in this overall argument. Nilges first turns to DeLillo’s recent fiction, from The Body Artist (2001) to Zero K (2016), to show how these novels historicize today’s temporal crisis. Just as the consolidation of the novel as a literary form across the 18th and 19th centuries occurred in direct relation to capitalism’s reconfiguration of time, DeLillo’s novels re-engage this dialectic of narrative temporality and capitalist standardization to counter the pervasive immediacy of finance capitalism’s “new temporal regime.” The second chapter then hones in on the distinction between phenomenological and historical time. Novels such as 10:04 (Lerner), A Visit from the Goon Squad (Egan), How to Live Safely in a Fictional Universe (Yu) and The Flamethrowers (Kushner), all employ non-linear, disjunctive or asynchronous narrative strategies to stage a formal, aesthetic conceptualization of time. Dislocating subjective temporality, these texts privilege historical knowledge over immediate experience in order to generate a conception of the contemporary itself as something more than an index of mere chronological proximity—a common social and political project.

These arguments set up what I found to be the book’s most important section, on the contemporary African American time novel. Here, Nilges raises a question that readers already might have found themselves asking: who is the presumptive “we” experiencing—and proclaiming—a temporal crisis? In a nation-state structured through the ongoing reproduction of racial hierarchy, this “we” obscures an uneven terrain. Whereas DeLillo or Gibson see something new in temporal crisis, African American writers have long recognized that time itself is a historical category constituted in and through social domination, and have responded to denials of futurity by cultivating what Ralph Ellison famously called “a different sense of time” opposed to the hegemonic temporality of American white supremacy, nationalism and, often, capitalism.4 Recent works by Johnson, Laymon, and Whitehead, Nilges shows, take up this project by tracking back (and sometimes projecting forward) in time, not to recover cultural memory but to “re-temporalize the present” (160) and articulate the possibility of new, alternative futures. Frustrated with the static logic of multicultural inclusivity, these writers construct a vision of contemporaneity that recognizes the present as the site of risk, uncertainty and open possibility.

How to Read then concludes by returning to its fundamental preoccupation with periodization. In contemporary literary studies, these discussions remain oriented by Jameson’s concept of postmodernism, even if recently revised into more baroque, involuted forms.5 After a lucid reconsideration of these debates, Nilges argues for retaining postmodernism but as a more limited term, specific to the cultural products of a brief period in the 1960s and 1970s. This transitional moment saw the consolidation of the new stage of neoliberal, financial capitalism that now orders our contemporary world, and which, he argues, Jameson’s concept of postmodernity still aptly names. This distinction between postmodern cultural forms and the historical condition of postmodernity itself is minor, perhaps, but useful nevertheless. It refocuses attention on historical change and critical totalization, rather than terminological debates, and privileges the complexity of transition over linear narratives of exhaustion.

Still, Nilges’s choice to retain postmodernity as the contemporary’s defining condition risks obscuring some of the most important insights developed in his readings. Indeed, How to Read compellingly articulates contemporary fiction’s re-inscription of futurity. Yet in doing so the book repeatedly makes visible the limits of postmodernity’s usefulness as a critical account of the present. It is striking, for instance, that Nilges’s concluding argument for a more circumscribed understanding of postmodernism recalls not Jameson’s field-defining thesis but David Harvey’s less influential intervention into these debates. Nilges doesn’t discuss Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity (1991), but contra Jameson’s insistence that postmodernism heralded a new stage of capitalism, Harvey maintained, rather more sceptically, that it was better grasped as a symptom of the latest phase of “time-space compression” through which capitalism has historically re-organized itself on a global scale.6 Harvey’s argument develops his fundamental insight that capitalism’s recurring temporal accelerations are never linear, one-dimensional processes but contradictory ones, occurring in dialectical relation to transformations in spatial organization (“spatial fixes”), vast changes in the labor process, and technological innovations.7 For Harvey, periodic cycles of acceleration renew accumulation but also constitute limits upon which capitalism runs aground. Rather than presuming an ongoing, seamless expansion, therefore, Harvey’s theory of postmodernism was also a theory of economic crisis.

I am not recalling Harvey’s Marxist geography to raise perhaps inevitable (though often tedious) debates about the relative primacy of space versus time, which Nilges refreshingly bypasses. Rather, I want to highlight Harvey’s point about the material dimensions and the constitutive limits of global capitalism, as it poses a valuable corrective to Jameson’s vision of an all-encompassing abstraction, predicated on endless temporal acceleration and spatial extension. Nilges’s discussion of temporal crisis develops directly out of Jameson’s account; nevertheless, hisreadings repeatedly register the material limits Harvey more insistently highlights: “capitalism has to work hard,” Nilges notes, “to erase competing forms of being in time” (147). Likewise, his discussion of the African American time novel brings out the ways that “temporal immobility,” rather than acceleration, functions in the context of racialization to exclude certain people from full “belonging” in the present. For African Americans, as Whitehead aptly puts it in a line from John Henry Days (2001) that Nilges returns to several times, “[i]t’s always Mississippi in the 1950s” (132). Nilges’s point here is that for certain groups of people, the collapse of futurity has been a longstanding condition of American life. However, I also took away a different, perhaps even opposing, insight from Whitehead’s line: temporal acceleration itself can never be an established condition of contemporary capitalism because it is not a completed process, but a site of ongoing contradiction and struggle. This is the case, furthermore, not only for particular groups of people (e.g. African Americans) but, in different and uneven ways, for everyone. If so, then the temporal immobility Whitehead refers to here is not an aberration within real-time capitalism but one of its central, structural necessities.

This raises a slightly different set of questions than Nilges pursues. Can the temporal crisis analyzed in How to Read be extended to encompass both global capitalism’s accelerations and delays? Or the “deepening divide” Ruth Wilson Gilmore identifies between “the hyper-mobile and the friction-fixed”?8 To understand the relation between race and globalization, Gilmore argues, we need to supplement Harvey’s concept of “time-space compression” with its temporal opposite, “time-space expansion.”9 Gilmore has in mind the vast expansion of the carceral system since the 1970s, but her concept of friction applies as well to any number of the proliferating forms of slowness, immobility and delay that characterize the global economy: the spatial enclosure of surplus populations in slums, homeless encampments and detention centers; the endless wait for public services, from transportation to medical care; the low-wage service work that underpins the apparent instantaneity of finance capital, by requiring people to take on multiple jobs for longer (more “flexible”) hours. Finally, and perhaps most crucially, despite the vast profits of the financial sector, contemporary capitalism’s defining feature is not accelerating accumulation, but rather stagnation: slowness and friction, in other words, at a systemic level.10

These examples emphasize Gilmore’s point that friction is not a mere lagging indicator.11 Rather, capitalism today functions (if that’s the right word) through both compression and expansion, producing temporalities of slowness and immobility as themselves new sites and modalities of profit, exploitation and extraction.12 Even if the organizing framework of postmodernity is ill-equipped to foreground these uneven and contradictory temporalities, Nilges’s study makes the convincing case that American fiction’s recent grappling with narrative time is the site of its artistic and political significance. For that, How to Read will be a crucial resource for anyone looking to develop more complex accounts of contemporary literary culture.

1. Fredric Jameson, “On the Power of the Negative,” Mediations 28, no. 1 (2014): 71.
2. Fredric Jameson, “The End of Temporality” Critical Inquiry 29 (Summer 2003): 695-719.
3. Mark McGurl, “Real/Quality,” in Time: A Vocabulary of the Present, ed. Joel Burges and Amy J. Elias (New York: New York University Press, 2016).
4. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Vintage Books, 1952) 8.
5. See Jeffrey Nealon, Post-Postmodernism, Or the Cultural Logic of Just-in-Time Capitalism, (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2012).
6. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1991). See also Natalie Melas, “Out of Date: David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity and the Postmodern Condition,” Post45 (online), 5.19.20, Accessed 27 July 2022,https://post45.org/2020/05/out-of-date-david-harveys-the-condition-of-postmodernity-and-the-postmodern-condition/.
7. For a pointed summary seeDavid Harvey, “Globalization and the ‘Spatial Fix’” geographische revue 2 (2001): 23–30.
8. Gilmore, Abolition Geography: Essays Toward Liberation (London: Verso, 2022): 117.
9. Gilmore, Abolition Geography 117.
10. Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (London: Verso, 2004); Sarah Brouillette, Joshua Clover, and Annie McClanahan, “Introduction: Late, Autumnal, Immiserating, Terminal,” Theory and Event 22: 2 (April 2019): 325–336.
11. Gilmore, Abolition Geography 114.
12. See, for instance, Neferti X. M. Tadiar, Remaindered Life (Durham: Duke University Press, 2022), esp. 164–169.