Everywhere today, we are urged to "connect." Literary critics celebrate
a new "honesty" in contemporary fiction or call for a return to
"realism." Yet such rhetoric is strikingly reminiscent of earlier
theorizations. Two of the most famous injunctions of twentieth-century
writing-E. M. Forster's "Only connect . . ." and Fredric Jameson's
"Always historicize!"-helped establish connection as the purpose of the
novel and its reconstruction as the task of criticism. But what if
connection was not the novel's modus operandi but the defining aesthetic
ideology of our era-and its most monetizable commodity? What kind of
thought is left for the novel when all ideas are acceptable as long as
they can be fitted to a consumer profile?
This book develops a new theory of the novel for the twenty-first
century. In the works of writers such as J. M. Coetzee, Rachel Cusk,
James Kelman, W. G. Sebald, and Zadie Smith, Timothy Bewes identifies a
mode of thought that he calls "free indirect," in which the novel's
refusal of prevailing ideologies can be found. It is not situated in a
character or a narrator and does not take a subjective or perceptual
form. Far from heralding the arrival of a new literary genre, this
development represents the rediscovery of a quality that has been
largely ignored by theorists: thought at the limits of form. Free
Indirect contends that this self-awakening of contemporary fiction
represents the most promising solution to the problem of thought today.
