Belonging and Narrative: A Theory of the American Novel by Laura Bieger

Abstract

Reviewed by: Belonging and Narrative: A Theory of the American Novel by Laura Bieger Lieven Ameel BIEGER, LAURA. Belonging and Narrative: A Theory of the American Novel. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2018. 182 pp. $40.00 print; $0.00 e-book. Laura Bieger’s study Belonging and Narrative: A Theory of the American Novel looks at developments in the history of the American novel from the late eighteenth to the early twenty-first century, with a focus on how literary narratives engage with questions of belonging. In addition to an introductory chapter, which outlines the key concepts and which contextualizes the study’s focus within the broader fields of narrative and American studies, the book consists of four analysis chapters. Each analysis chapter focuses on one particular text, respectively: Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly (1799), Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep (1934), and Richard Powers’s The Echo Maker (2006). The study is structured chronologically, but the different analysis chapters also have thematic orientations, with the book structured around four “iconic American sites—the frontier, the region, the ghetto, the homeland” and around four different kinds of texts: “the letter, the sketch, the found object, and the brain-as-storytelling-machine” (9, 10). This adds to the chronological progression a fascinating way of branching out into questions of space and literary genre (although the categorization according to four different models of the human psyche, vis., empiricist, Swedenborgian, Freudian, and neuroscientific models, feels much more tentative). Belonging and Narrative displays a keen interest in how the American novel has provided a way to structure relationships to space and to home. Belonging is understood here as “the desire for a place in the world” and one of the key aims of the study is “to solicit an understanding of narrative as the mediating structure to which we turn to feel and direct our yearning for a place in the world” (75). By examining how this desire is given voice in particular iterations of the novel, this study also zooms in on questions of identity and narrative agency. While the book includes a substantial introduction, a somewhat longer articulation of the role of different categories and understandings of belonging—and of whether these are all compatible with the focus of this study—would have been helpful. Belonging can be approached as belonging through material means (57) or belonging in an existential (30) or a phenomenological sense (25–29); the urge to belong can be directed specifically to a spatial environment or regional community (e.g., Jewett), or to the (nuclear) family (e.g., Roth); within the context of the American novel, one added dimension is the extent to which diverse narrative voices can aspire to belong to the canon of the [End Page 427] American novel. More generally, are belonging as dwelling, belonging as identity, and belonging as autonomy compatible with each other within this study? In part, these questions could have been clarified by drawing more explicitly on one particular theoretical framework. Cultural geography is referenced, but there is little engagement with specific theories or approaches from this field of study—I think specifically of the work of Yi-Fi Tuan and Edward Relph on the subject, but there is also a host of more recent cultural-geographical work. Among recent studies on American literature and belonging, Aleksandra Bida’s Mapping Home in Contemporary Narratives stands out as one interesting dialogic perspective to Laura Bieger’s readings, especially concerning the contemporary novel. The strength of this book lies in particular in the attentive close readings performed in the individual analysis chapters. Bieger is interested in how narrative is used, rather than in “narrative as a mode of representation” (14), and the readings convincingly show not only how the novels are structured but also the performative uses of such structures. One example is how the reading of Brown’s Edgar Huntly unpacks the implications of the epistolary genre and its dynamics as moving between recovery and rejection. Insightful textual analysis goes hand in hand with comprehensive contextualization, for example when, in the case of The Country of the Pointed Firs, Bieger convincingly shows...