How is a reader to trust the account of someone who subsists on the ability to deceive? How to accredit a narrator whose welfare hinges on the credibility of the story itself? By what means might an impoverished rogue character lay claim to veracity, much less deliver on the promise of moral edification, in a milieu where such values were invariably mediated by wealth, status, and notions of confessional and ethnic purity? These questions have figured centrally, albeit implicitly, in literary criticism of the picaresque, yet never have they been posed with such intergeneric and geographic breadth, or given rise to hypotheses as tantalizing and persuasive, as in Barbara Fuchs’s latest book. By mining the early modern Spanish literary and historical canons for rich, unseen veins of narrative instability and incertitude, Knowing Fictions assembles a more capacious frame for the picaresque, one less dependent on the thematic markers that traditionally have circumscribed the genre than on the vexed, sometimes ludic, and always interested relationship between narrator and narration.In addition to Francisco Delicado’s La lozana andaluza, the anonymous Viaje de Turquía, Cervantes’s captivity plays and a handful of his Novelas ejemplares, and Mateo Alemán’s Guzmán de Alfarache, Fuchs examines a number of texts that get pulled, wittingly or not, into the orbit of the picaresque. Though the genre is usually associated with first-person narration, what unites these writings in Fuchs’s account is their self-awareness as fiction. This disquietingly modern outlook manifests subtly in narrators who idealize, minimize, distort, or disavow the events at hand and who are often intimately involved with the characters and complicit in their dealings, despite never offering readers a disclaimer that would advertise such liabilities. Somewhat paradoxically, Fuchs identifies an inverse relationship between narratorial proximity and reliability, whereby the closer the narrator becomes to the story, the farther the story strays from objective truth. Scholars of early modern Spain will recognize such contradictions, in part, as the fallout of a society obsessed with notions of genealogical origins, religious orthodoxy, and ethnic purity, which catalyzed compulsory accounts of the self—largely in the form of Inquisitional testimony and confessions—and, according to what is by now a well-established thesis, a consequent upsurge in autobiographical forms like the picaresque. More recently, scholars of the period across a range of disciplines have pondered anew this problem of what Fuchs calls “confessional opacity” (14), as well as its latent role in the emergence of skepticism in an Iberia traditionally assumed to have embraced that epistemological trend only belatedly.Knowing Fictions claims that we should look to the literary, too, for skeptic paradigms, embedded in the demand of picaresque narrators that we read between the lines. It is in the ambiguities of this interlinear innuendo that Fuchs locates the critical power of fictional literature as a tool for contestation, both in our contemporary era of fake news and global media empires—as she concludes in a brief yet rousing postscript—and in the imperial Spain that engendered the pícaro. Scarcely could one desire a more capable model for this contrapuntal labor than Fuchs’s book itself, whose close readings show at nearly every turn how literature inflected and challenged various hegemonic structures of early modernity. The last chapter’s examination of Cervantes’s Novelas ejemplares is at once the most sweeping and the most personal example in this regard. Critics have long toiled to square the collection’s didactic pretensions with the more playful and avowedly picaresque content of certain novellas. By interrogating ostensibly detached third-person narrators who derive vicarious enjoyment from the picaresque lifestyle of the characters (“La ilustre fregona”), the voyeuristic pleasures of theatricality in the criminal underworld (“Rinconete y Cortadillo”), and a syphilitic soldier recounting an outlandish tale of two talking dogs (“El coloquio de los perros”), Fuchs finds in these stories an imperative to suspend judgment and embrace skepticism. Eschewing fixed identities, the picaresque itineraries of the Novelas ejemplares “introduce a radical contingency into the world of the texts, suggesting the possibility of living otherwise and the paradoxical exemplarity of individual exploration” (122).Elsewhere the ironies that Fuchs uncovers, and their implications for authorities of all stripes, are more devastating. The first chapter details how the Auctor in Lozana, a slippery figure who is anything but disinterested in his portrayal of the titular character, a prostitute with whom he shares the affliction of syphilis, destabilizes not just his own authority as narrator but that of the dominant narratives surrounding imperial expansion. Set shortly before Charles V’s sack of Rome, Lozana constitutes for Fuchs “a powerful counternarrative to the translatio imperii that would make of Spain a new Rome” (37). By applying a similar analytic framework to a treatise on syphilis written by Delicado around the same time as his ribald, picaresque Lozana, Fuchs shows how both texts’ engagement with the venereal infection “foregrounds the connection between empire and the ravages of disease,” thus pointing up “the costs of empire and the intractable damage it leaves in its wake” (43).Untruth itself, particularly its picaresque strain, can also spread like a contagion. In the Viaje de Turquía, which Fuchs studies in chapter 2, the character of Pedro de Urdemalas is, like many of the thousands of historical captives who managed to return to Spain after their imprisonment, invested in proving his moral and religious integrity during his ordeal in Constantinople. Yet though he never reneges on his faith, in Fuchs’s view the various deceits that he deploys—including masquerading as a medical doctor and a Greek Orthodox priest—threaten to undermine the credibility gained by his remaining steadfast to Christianity. Pedro’s skills in rhetoric and manipulation, as well as his willingness to freely share them with his interlocutors in order that they too might profit from trans-Mediterranean chicanery, further erode whatever trust readers might place in the narrative. As with the episode of the false captives in Cervantes’s Persiles or a handful of wily characters in his captivity plays, deception, self-interest, and venality are liable to contaminate the frame of the story, even if it takes a discerning reader to spot the tokens of such vices therein. Whether in a bid to profit, to smooth out the road to reintegration into European society, or simply to survive, such rhetorical gambits “underscore the opportunistic ventriloquism of the captive instead of his probity” (81), thus obfuscating the principled conduct that most distinguished him from the pícaro.Not even the most vaunted hierarchies and solemn bureaucracies are immune to the unruly forces of picaresque narration in a society where “fictions appear both endemic and necessary” (109). Fuchs rescues the subtlety of these forces even in the most overtly picaresque text of the canon, Guzmán de Alfarache, which she treats in chapter 3. Here the first-person narrator’s quest to alleviate shortcomings related to his ancestry and financial credit—both of which are sites of uncertainty and mistrust—mirrors homologous pressures circulating in sixteenth-century Spain. Yet, as with many of the texts that Fuchs studies, it is only through the character’s sojourn abroad in Italy that the stakes of imperial, national, ethnic, and personal identity come into sharper focus even as the foreign setting, true to the formula, enables greater latitude and profitable duplicity. Beneath these anxieties and maneuvers is for the pícaro the ontological reality of poverty, which, as the church and a number of reformers lamented, was nonetheless prone to the performative abilities of professional mendicants. As she does with Delicado’s treatise on syphilis, Fuchs marshals earnest writings by Alemán on poverty to suggest how nonfictional representations of another social malady are unwittingly filtered through its portrayal in fiction by the same author. Administrative schemes to ensure legitimacy, whether to winnow the genuinely poor from false beggars or to register ethnoreligious transgressions of blood purity statutes, thus ultimately proved self-defeating, since “any system that attempts to codify distinctions between the authentic and the inauthentic also furnished the materials for a convincing simulacrum” (95). That early modern Spain should be especially susceptible to these sorts of imposture is not altogether surprising, given its long-standing characterization as a notarial culture of functionaries, accountants, chroniclers, and copyists, who themselves often served as satirical fodder. Yet as Fuchs tracks the displacements of texts and characters across a wider archival and transnational field, the stakes of picaresque “knowing fictions” become at once more pointed and poised for application to contexts well beyond that of the genre’s origins.Before scholars heed this call, implicit in the book’s own boldly expansionist designation of “para-picaresque” texts, they may want to consider the degree to which the dialectical binds summoned by Knowing Fictions—belief and doubt, authority and implausibility—should be seen as a product of picaresque fiction or simply fiction. This is a question not fully resolved in the book: though at times it makes a persuasive case for how the pícaro’s itinerancy, view from below, deceptiveness, or other constitutive traits introduce a singularly picaresque form of skepticism, at others it appears that fictional literature, writ large, also does the trick, so to speak (which vaguely recalls earlier critical paradigms that centered not the picaresque but the theatricality of the comedia as a destabilizing nexus for truth). Another issue that crops up in the drive to underscore fiction as a disruptive force is an occasional tendency to overstate the authority of protoscientific or empirical epistemes as foils. For instance, though its importance certainly burgeoned with European incursions into the New World, eyewitness testimony had yet to attain the more authoritative status that the introductory chapter’s efforts to unsettle it might suggest, even as Fuchs marginally acknowledges some of these debates. As historians of science have shown, therapeutic knowledge, too, was susceptible to such vagaries as subjective interpretation, symptomatic variations, and the ethos of a given source, such that situating medical treatises on syphilis against literary representations of the disease historically would not have yielded the same shades of contrast as those sketched in Knowing Fictions. On the other hand, it is this very cross-contamination, the futility of insulating discourses of prestige from less dominant voices, that underpins a central contention of the book and that hones the critical “knowing readers” more given to questioning those discourses.These minor objections in no way diminish the monograph’s success in highlighting early forms of self-conscious fiction as a locus of distrust and critique in an age of uncertainties. Narrative authority has long been a central concern in literary criticism, but rarely has it been explored with such finesse and discernment. Those familiar with Fuchs’s previous scholarship will not be surprised that Knowing Fictions is seasoned with lucid and highly fecund arguments, but they will surely relish the penetrating and often dazzling parallels that she draws both within her objects of analysis and across texts, genres, and geographic locales. Scholars of early modern Spain will find in this study a refreshingly new take on the picaresque, while those working in other disciplines, eras, and national traditions will discover a trove of original insights to enrich their work farther afield—value propositions that not even the most skeptical reader can deny.