Novel Shocks: Urban Renewal and the Origins of Neoliberalism. Myka Tucker-Abramson. New York: Fordham University Press, 2019. Pp. v+197.

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Novel Shocks asks how novels of the 1950s and 1960s responded to New York City’s central role in urban renewal projects that paved the way for the “creative destruction” (2) associated with neoliberalism and US empire. New York City was at the center of so-called “urban decline” (1) ideology seeking to explain the inward “great migration of blacks, Latinos, and Puerto Ricans” and outward migration of “industry, commerce, and the white tax base” (1) to the emerging suburbs. While the Federal Housing Act of 1949 and Federal Highway Act of 1956 had national scope, New York reaped the lion’s share of material and ideological changes. NYC was the central testing ground of new urban/suburban relations “designed by planners, politicians, and downtown business interests” (1). The twin engines of suburbanization and urban renewal “helped the United States restabilize global capitalism after World War II by absorbing the surpluses of capital and labor whose stagnation manifested itself in the global Great Depression of the 1930s” (7). Tucker-Abramson focuses throughout on the violence wrought by international capitalism and its imminent resistance by insurgent communes, arguing that “urban renewal, in other words, formed the basis for the long and soon to be global struggle over the displacement and dispossession of urban populations that has been a defining feature of neoliberalism” (8).