Adam Grener’s fine book, Improbability, Chance, and the Nineteenth-Century Realist Novel, offers an intervention into the longstanding tradition of judging realist novels based on the standard of their probability. Instead, his study takes as its premise the idea that improbability is crucially important to the most central practitioners of nineteenth-century realism, who strategically employ elements of the improbable to call attention to the deeply historical worlds that their novels represent. These novelists (Austen, Scott, Dickens, Trollope, Hardy) were committed to a mode of fiction that primarily foregrounded chance and coincidence to “represent a historical and contingent world” (3), rather than creating a convincing tale of ordinary and conventional probability. Rather than concealing the fictional elements of their realist novels, these authors deliberately deploy narrative forms that emphasize improbability and chance in their plots, and for their characters, in order to interrogate the “questions of contingency, difference, and scale that accompanied the massive transformations of British society during the nineteenth century” (4). By scrutinizing the historical shifts in the constructions of probability, from Aristotle through the long nineteenth century, alongside his genealogy of realist novels, Grener puts forward a nuanced reading and theory of realism that makes possible multiple hermeneutic lines of inquiry that bring a fresh focus to the existing scholarship in these disciplines.Grener charts the shift in the meanings and uses of the concept of probability throughout the nineteenth century, focusing on the tension between the seeming randomness of the small picture and the putatively more concretized ordinary and everyday stability of the big picture. With their awareness of this tension, novelists of the realist project seek to cultivate the ideas of chance and coincidence in their texts in order to defamiliarize improbability, through language, form, and thematic content, rather than striving for plausible verisimilitude. By historicizing improbability in their novels, these authors are able to emphasize the implications of difference and otherness for both realist representation and their own lived realities. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, probability reflected not randomness but rather human limitation; chance was viewed, as Pope had formulated a century before, as “Direction, which thou canst not see.”1 The universe still functioned according to fundamental laws, but our human ability to grasp the knowledge of these laws was flawed and incomplete, an epistemological problem. As Grener suggests, at the start of the century, “chance and probability were ways of talking about this imperfect knowledge” (15). By the end of the period, the two terms became oppositional, with chance designating a more inherent random quality of the universe itself and probability figuring forth as a way to mitigate that randomness, a force for revealing the uniform order of the statistical aggregate. By theorizing the realist novel through the lenses of these evolving constructions of the improbable, Grener reveals their engagement with a narrative form aware of both its own representative limitations and determined historicizing mission.This “uncoupling of realism from the standard of probability” (28) and the defamiliarizing and historicizing of the improbable serves as the methodological foundation of Grener’s critical investigation throughout the book. The scholarship is comprehensively deep throughout as well; rendered in critical histories and literature reviews that are inclusive without overwhelming the rhetorical matter at hand, his instinct for what and whom to engage in the text proper, and what material should get relegated to helpful footnotes, strikes a fine balance. The careful defining of terms and tensions (chance/probability, individual variation/aggregate order, classical probability/frequentist probability, etc.), along with the seamless ways that primary sources, secondary criticism, and theoretical paradigms coalesce, provides a useful scaffolding on which to build a more persuasive argument about the nineteenth-century realist project. There is a lot of attention to the close reading of form, as one might expect, and the textual analysis of the novels tends toward plumbing the depths of fewer concentrated moments in these representative books, rather than a more widespread breadth of coverage. As we progress through the study, Grener reminds us constantly of his own methodological genealogy. The ways in which each chapter builds on the one before it—and within each chapter the internal organization of its discrete parts—facilitates a convincing trajectory for realism, (im)probability, and chance for the entire nineteenth century.Grener breaks his argument into two main parts. Part one, “Realism and Difference” examines the Romantic period, and includes a chapter each on Austen and Scott; part two, “Chance and Scale,” covers the Victorian age and features chapters on Dickens, Trollope, and Hardy. Earlier versions of chapters 3 and 4 are the only previously published material. In part one, Grener argues that Austen and Scott each develop a narrative realism that challenges the classical construction of probability through a discursive commitment to difference, in Austen’s case through the cultivation of temporal variation and by problematizing the didactic function of realism, and in Scott’s through an engagement with cultural otherness and historical frameworks. In part two, the focus evolves with the context, as chance and scale within the Victorian novel take center stage. Grener demonstrates here how these writers make use of chance to provide “a mechanism to capture incongruities of scale that emerge as probability becomes a means of managing variation and randomness through aggregation” (31). Dickens investigates the chasm between the individual and society in his novel of the city, Trollope questions whether the bildungsroman can adequately narrate the tension between the particularity of the individual and the abstraction of the aggregate in the Victorian social body, and Hardy maps the implications of evolutionary theories for temporal historical change, and questions the realist novel’s ability to represent collective culture.In chapter 1, Grener takes up some of the usual lines of inquiry that scholars often do, including examining Austen’s meta-critical style in Northanger Abbey, in which she calls specific attention to the conventions of not just an English Gothic tradition, but her own romance novels, and scrutinizing the familiar blunders and misunderstandings that drive novels such as Sense and Sensibility and Emma. However, he takes up these moments against a new backdrop of Austen’s commitment to difference and the particular, rather than the classical realist metric of probability. Reading her realist technique against Richard Whately’s 1821 review of Austen in The Quarterly Review, in which he cited the novelist as being the most successful writer to embody Aristotle’s classical precepts, Grener argues instead that “it is Austen’s commitment to particularity that prompts her to interrogate the relationship between literary form and the ideal of rationality that underpins the classical interpretation of probability” (51). He goes on to suggest that some of these Austenian narrative worlds that appear very confined to the probable are in fact deceptively deep and unpredictable. In setting up the ironic tension between what such a one as General Tilney, or such a one as Darcy, would and should do and what the actual General Tilney and the particular Darcy actually do, he illustrates the kind of dichotomy of the probabilistic that characterizes many of the expectations in the Austen canon. The chapter’s final section probes the uncertain futures of three of Austen’s minor characters, the baby Anna from Emma, Fanny’s sister Susan in Mansfield Park, and the oft-forgotten third Dashwood sister, Margaret in Sense and Sensibility. Grener’s analysis of the inscrutable nature of Anna’s potential future, put in context through a masterful reading of Emma’s dialogic interaction with Knightley, in the midst of a novel filled with monologic voices (Miss Bates, Mr. Woodhouse, Mrs. Elton, Isabella, and others), is some of the most rewarding reading of this entire study. Nonetheless, there are also moments when the theoretical lenses come up a bit short, such as when the chapter suggests Austen’s primary concerns are aesthetic because of her skepticism about the “didactic function of fiction” (61), in a reading of her works that often elides the gender studies approaches that dominate the current Austen critical landscape, never mentions Mary Wollstonecraft or similar central influences, and seems to take for granted the happy endings of her novels. Although these flaws are admittedly minor ones, Grener’s own methodology might have offered engaging interpretations, such as reading the end of Sense and Sensibility in terms of the tension between the putatively happy ending that such a one as Marianne should get and the more complicated and problematic (and didactic) ending numerous readers notice for the particular Marianne, one that gives her away as a reward to Colonel Brandon after her behavior has been normalized and corrected.In chapter 2, Grener surveys Scott’s historical fiction and his realist framework that both depends on and challenges the paradigm of regular, everyday life in order to question the ways in which the supernatural elements in his novels allow us to read chance and (im)probability with an eye toward cultural otherness. He uses one of Coleridge’s marginal notes on Waverly as a jumping off point, which introduces both rationalist unbelief in Scott alongside “precise coincidence” and the “full effect of superstition for the reader” to explore the tension between modern rationality and traditional superstition (69). Grener argues that “Scott’s historical fiction presupposes a rationalist framework that acknowledges that spirits and supernatural events are not real but then presents circumstances that are so highly coincidental that they evoke the ‘pathology’ of superstition” (69). His reading of Scott progresses through “The Two Drovers,” Redgauntlet, and The Bride of Lammermoor, while reading chance and causal ambiguity through methodologies that incorporate Tzvetan Todorov’s theorization of the fantastic and Georg Lukács’ analysis of realist representation. The reading of Robin the Highlander is a particularly strong moment in a very persuasive chapter, as Scott’s treatment of the historical underpinnings of what appears to be improbable chance anticipates the historicizing of fatalism in Redgauntlet, and the undermining of Jacobite ideology, a narrative technique that simultaneously author-izes modern rationalist thinking and links it invariably with beliefs from the past. The supernatural seems possible but proves to be contextual. Ultimately, The Bride of Lammermoor takes Scott’s formal dualism to the extreme by suggesting the foundational historical age of superstitious belief provides an active, ongoing, if improbable, connection with cultural otherness.Chapter 3 takes us to the Victorian realist novel, which resists probability to an even greater extent than did the Romantics, with a focus on Dickens, whose realism “acknowledges but overcomes the gulf that emerges between the individual and the collective” (100). Grener takes up the remarkably improbable coincidences in Martin Chuzzlewit about which critics, both contemporary and modern, have long complained and objected to. The final chance encounter in London between Mark Tapley and the former American neighbors he shared with Martin allows Dickens to call attention to the “asymmetries of scale that structure market subjectivity” (103). The tension that chance reveals in this novel is between the autonomy and anonymity that an individual, like Martin or Mark, believes he retains and the broader social arena of the metropolis, with its numerous points of social connection and interaction. Grener does a wonderful job of cataloging what he calls the novel’s “staggering number of coincidences,” by enumerating all twenty-two (by his count) collectively in an extended footnote that helps to make his persuasive point (104-5). At the heart of these improbable coincidences is Dickens’s didactic message about the ways in which the metropolis, with both its massive scale and market-driven social spaces, can elide the personal human connections that obtain, even if individuals can no longer perceive them, in the densely populated city. While the feeling of anonymity that the metropolis fosters produces widespread selfishness, Dickens’s improbable coincidences remind his characters (and readers) about the personal ties and responsibilities for each others’ welfare that the conditions of industrial Victorian capitalism has concealed. Grener’s reading of Dickens’s evolving use of the term “neighbor,” from a social space to an active, performative moral imperative, is particularly nuanced and graceful, as well as being illustrative for a wide range of his narrative treatments of the metropolis.Chapter 4 continues the examination of the individual in tension with the aggregate by turning to Trollope and the realist bildungsroman. Like Dickens’s fiction, Trollope’s novels Phineas Finn and Phineas Redux also scrutinize the challenges of reconciling the actions of individuals with the collective social perspective, and the problems that come from the realist novel’s attempt to represent that stress narratively. Grener focuses on the novels’ obsessive use of the language of gambling to describe the improbable chance that structures Phineas’s personal trajectory in the years leading up to the Second Reform Act of 1867, a period marked by an aggregate liberal progress that often took the form of statistical certainty. He argues that the “certainty that emerges at this level of abstraction . . . cannot be reconciled with Phineas’s individual position and action—statistical averages or intervals cannot be translated into individual choices. By pitting the language of odds against the logic of statistics, Trollope’s novel stages the increasing friction between subjective and objective conceptions of probability” (127). Ultimately, his improbable plot cannot link adequately the individual and the aggregate, as the idea of representation in the form of the bildungsroman takes center stage; if Dickens’s project was to reconcile these elements in tension, Trollope’s is to reveal the limits of attempting to do so. Grener invokes Bakhtin’s concept of “adventure time” and juxtaposes it with Phineas’s more vertical “career time” to demonstrate the incommensurable nature of these two perspectives, in a world that contains both the variable and contingent reality of the individual and the reality of statistical order found in the aggregate. While reading this chapter, one cannot help thinking of Dickens’s rendering of statistics as the “stutterings” in Hard Times, with Sissy Jupe’s awareness of their incompatibility with her own daily life.2In chapter 5, the novels of Thomas Hardy, with their oft-recognized reliance on chance and improbable coincidence, emerge as the last link in the chain of Grener’s nineteenth-century realist genealogy. Throughout the previous chapters, the strain between individual variation and aggregate order have been predominant, and this tension in Hardy becomes one that features the seemingly disparate forces of contingency and determinism. Refusing to see Hardy as a failed or anti-realist writer, this chapter reads Hardy’s improbable plots and form through the lens of Darwin’s theories of evolution and their impact on the historicism of his late-century narratives. By invoking chance and coincidence strategically in his novels, Hardy, like Dickens and Scott, represents the social forces that marginalize characters and attenuate their individual agency, even if (and because) they cannot perceive them. By incorporating evolutionary theory, Grener argues, novels such as The Return of the Native reveal “the absence of transhistorical structures of order,” thus defining “a historicism that works to cultivate modes of perception adequate to the contours of existence within a history that unfolds nonteleologically” (154–55). In terms of the big picture or long run, what might appear to be aggregate order could actually be historical evolutionary contingency. Grener connects the novel’s Diggory Venn with John Venn’s The Logic of Chance (1866), “a work that became ‘the most influential nineteenth-century work on the philosophy of probability’” (157). He also deploys an extended formalist narrative analysis of the free indirect mode and thought report in the novel to suggest the ways in which Hardy’s works offer an intervention into the faith that realism embraced about the supposed order of an aggregate world, rather than recognizing “the primacy of historical circumstance” (172). This final move, of course, seems to gesture toward literary naturalism.Grener’s convincing argument will be welcome reading for literary scholars, historians, and theorists and teachers of realism alike. His methodologies hold considerable promise for scholarship in other literary genres as well, most notably nineteenth-century sensation novels and detective fiction. In a book full of statistics and probability, there are even a few moments of playfulness to enjoy, such as when he deploys the verb “untangle” (56) to describe an interpretation of the passage in which Elinor notices the lock of hair in Edward’s ring. But perhaps these moments are just further instances of improbable chance.