Mathias Nilges's How to Read a Moment: The American Novel and the Crisis of the Present is probably the most important effort to periodize contemporary aesthetics since Fredric Jameson's landmark 1984 essay “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” which Jameson subsequently expanded into his 1991 book of the same name (give or take a comma). Jameson famously argued that the contemporary economic formation he called, following Ernest Mandel, late capitalism was characterized by the cultural dominant of postmodernism, whose characteristics included, among others, an attention to surfaces, an effacement of historicity, and a breakdown of the hierarchy between high and low. Jameson's essay was a striking effort, at a time when historicism was becoming the dominant mode of literary and arts criticism, to give shape to (or in Jameson's own terms, totalize) contemporary culture. Those of us who study the contemporary still work in its shadow.By now, however, there's a rough consensus that postmodernism has given way to a new cultural dominant; a fair amount of work in contemporary criticism has been devoted to imagining what this new dominant might be. Nilges both criticizes this project and participates in it. We'll get to the criticism later, but let's begin with Nilges's contribution, which argues that the best way of characterizing the contemporary novel may arise from leaning into, rather than rejecting, the term contemporary itself. Nilges begins his book with quotes from a surprisingly wide range of artists and commentators—Don DeLillo, William Gibson, Jameson, Lauren Berlant, Mark Fisher, Peter Thiel, Will Farrell, and others—who seem to concur that the present moment is characterized by “a loss of faith in futurity” (4), an inability to imagine change that has left us imprisoned in what feels like an eternal present. Building on the work of Cuauhtémoc Medina and other art historians—a field that has been wrestling with the concept of the contemporary for quite some time now—Nilges suggests that we understand the term to mean not “simply . . . art produced today” (6) but rather art that specifically addresses the contemporary as a problem. This art, Nilges argues, can help us understand the widely perceived crisis of futurity—a problem that Nilges, in Jamesonian mode, links to “the rise of real-time capitalism” (9) in which logistics aim to respond to consumer demands immediately and financial trades take place on the scale of the nanosecond.The novel, Nilges contends, is the art form most suited to helping us reimagine this moment because it uniquely conjoins narration and reflection, opening up a space of “mediated, critical interpretation” in which “we can locate [the form's] refusal of the logic of real-time capitalism” (56). Far from being a liability, the fact that the novel “emerges historically as an art form that tries to make sense of a moment when virtually every aspect of the world is subject to rapid and profound change” renders it an apt vehicle for thinking through the current problem “of a static, inescapable, and seemingly absolute Now without future” (12). This is because the novel “reminds us that time itself is a matter of specific forms of knowledge, forms that emerge and are useful under specific historical conditions but that also have shelf lives and thus expire” (13). With this knowledge in hand, we can approach the sense of futurity's demise not as an existential condition, but as a contingent historical problematic open to rethinking.The specific mode in which the novel tackles this problematic, Nilges proposes, is the Zeitroman, or time novel, which seeks to understand “time as narrative and as a form of knowledge” (19). As its name suggests, this subgenre of the novel “emerges in nineteenth-century German”; but the term comes into its own as a way of describing modernist works such as Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain and Robert Musil's The Man without Qualities before vanishing “from the German cultural landscape as a result of National Socialism's rise to power in 1933” (12). If the novel, in its classic phase, both accepts and contributes to the Enlightenment/liberal/capitalist understanding of time as the forward march of progress, and in anglophone modernism commits itself to exploring the varieties of subjective time, the Zeitroman treats time as a form with both historical and social determinants. While the term has been all but absent from anglophone literary criticism, Nilges argues that it helps us to understand a range of recent works, from the late fiction of Don DeLillo through novels by Charles Yu, Ben Lerner, Jennifer Egan, Colson Whitehead, Kiese Laymon, and others.DeLillo has always been a hard-to-peg figure in postwar US literary history. Once hailed as a postmodernist, he was subsequently reconfigured as a “systems novelist,” in Tom LeClair's resonant phrase; then, beginning with the 1997 Underworld, increasingly understood as a kind of complicated realist. One not insignificant contribution of How to Read a Moment is to allow us to reimagine DeLillo, through all the phases of his career and reception, as the chief US proponent of the Zeitroman. For those long familiar with his writing, this has the force of an aha moment. Unlike, say, War and Peace, in which the forward march of events registers inexorably even in drawing rooms and isolated country estates, DeLillo's novels foreground affects such as anticipation and boredom as experienced by characters for whom, as often as not, things don't happen. Focusing on DeLillo's twenty-first-century books, Nilges shows how, for instance, the author's 2003 Cosmopolis, set during a long day that the wealthy asset manager Eric Packer spends stuck in Manhattan traffic, offers not the metaphor for the endless present that it might first seem to, but an opportunity for Packer and his creator to think about the nature of time. Unlike the novels of Virginia Woolf or William Faulkner, “Cosmopolis's examination of the present . . . does not focus on the difficulties it may pose for subjective experience” (42). Rather, it “makes legible the temporal crises of our time resulting from a change in capitalism”—metonymized by the shift to nanosecond trades within Packer's own industry—“that brings with it a demand for new forms of temporal knowledge and exhausts our established temporal regime” (42). This is a compelling reading of the novel and a convincing explanation of why it translates poorly to the more temporally determined medium of film in David Cronenberg's 2012 adaptation. It's a reading that, moreover, seems broadly applicable to DeLillo's oeuvre. For instance, we might understand DeLillo's career-long fascination with terrorism as an inquiry into how the concept shapes narratives of time in advance of events that may or may not happen.In subsequent chapters, Nilges turns from DeLillo to a wide range of recent writers working within the form of the Zeitroman. Doing so, Nilges argues, requires thinking outside the recent turn within literary criticism “from hermeneutics [to] approaches that are aimed at immediacy and experience” (84), which itself reflects a long-standing preference for immediacy and experience within the American novel. Acknowledging the “many contemporary novels that make a good case for mood, sensuousness, and immediacy” (90), Nilges makes his own strong argument for the recent return of the novel of ideas, in the form of the Zeitroman in particular. Crucially for his argument he chooses examples from across the literary map: Yu, a writer of literary science fiction; Lerner, associated with autofiction; and Egan, frequently grouped with David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers as a practitioner of the “New Sincerity.” Yu's 2010 novel How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe perhaps unsurprisingly draws Nilges's attention insofar as it focuses on a time travel mechanic who, traveling around fixing the problems created by other time travelers, finds himself literally “stuck in the ‘Present-Indefinite’” (106). Yu's protagonist also searches for his father, the now-lost inventor of time travel, a quest that evinces “nostalgic longing for linear order and temporality” and thus implies “that time has a natural origin” (107). How to Live Safely, Nilges argues, traces the character's movement away from “the passivity and escapism of his original position of being stuck in the Present-Indefinite” (108) and toward “re-creating himself as a developing, historical subject who is able to inhabit the moving present” (109). If Yu's embrace of science fiction tropes allows him to literalize the concerns of the time novel, however, his protagonist's self-examination and concern with his father point toward his affinity with more conventionally realist writers such as Lerner and Egan. Nilges's reading of Lerner's 10:04 suggests a way of understanding autofiction, with its seemingly interminable fascination with self-narration, as something more than—indeed, the opposite of—a dissolution of the literary into the pure transcription of experience.It is Nilges's third chapter, however, that is arguably his most compelling. Here Nilges argues that “African American novelists like Colson Whitehead and Kiese Laymon,” working within a tradition in which the complexity of narratives of progress has long been taken for granted, “recover a form of futurity that is absent from other aspects of contemporary culture and thought, one that emerges through a prospective, anticipatory understanding of the present as plural and heterochronous” (127). Deeply aware of how competing narratives of time have structured US racial divisions, and embracing speculative forms as fictional modes capable of working with this knowledge, the novels of Whitehead and Laymon reject the false choice between “join[ing] in a historyless contemporary or be[ing] marked as constitutively uncontemporary” (163). Instead, they rediscover “futurity” in “the plurality of the present” (169), even if this futurity can only be intimated rather than detailed. Nilges reads Toni Morrison's 1987 Beloved as an early African American Zeitroman that, attempting to imagine “ways of relating to the present that generate the futurity erased from the present by memory” (159), self-consciously interrogates its own genre of historical fiction. In this way Beloved anticipates the recent shift within African American fiction from historical fiction to speculative genres. Nilges reads Whitehead's 2011 Zone One, for instance, as employing its zombie apocalypse setting to replace “the common narrative of the eternal present after the end of time . . . with an account of the present as a time of possibility” (165). These possibilities remain unspecified—Whitehead's novel famously ends with its protagonist wading into a sea of zombies as he seeks to make his way out of a newly breached New York City—but, as Nilges shows, they are no less compelling if read in the light of Ernst Bloch's theory of utopia as necessarily unrepresentable.Nilges's fourth and final chapter offers both a critique of literary periodization and a new periodization of our long contemporary moment. How to Read a Moment departs from efforts to replace postmodernism with a new master term in a number of ways, including its insistence on the Zeitroman as one genre among others, and its investment in reading authors like DeLillo and Morrison as already working within this form in the 1980s. For Nilges, this was the decade during which postmodernism as a literary form ended—not because its ideas became outdated but, on the contrary, because they were taken up so fully into the fabric of the economy. Postmodernism, that is, names a literary investment in certain ideas able to be understood as liberatory until they suddenly reappear at the heart of capitalism. It is then that the Zeitroman begins to appear, not as some new master narrative but as a tendency slowly making its way to recognizability.It's impressive to see a book that is simultaneously explicitly modest about its claims and able to mount a totalizing (though never totalized) account of the long contemporary. Like any good book of this sort, it leaves one asking questions. For instance, it makes sense for Nilges to discuss African American fiction in a separate chapter, given that tradition's very different relation to concerns about an endless, futureless present. One nonetheless wonders if this approach hides as much as it reveals. Whitehead's prose style, for instance, seems more indebted to DeLillo's purposelessly flat tone than to Morrison's lyrical one.But this is just a sign that How to Read a Moment is doing the work of good literary history, which is to raise questions as well as answer them. It's this ability to do both things that makes Nilges's book, to my mind, the best account of both postmodernism and what succeeds it that we have—at least for now.