Free Indirect: The Novel in a Postfictional Age: by Timothy Bewes, New York, Columbia University Press, 2022, xxi + 316 pp., $35.00 (paper).

Interestingly, in analysing E. M. Forster's I Howards End i (1910) and its central idea to "only connect", Bewes suggests that in so strongly calling attention to connection the novel actually already suggests its impossibility. Bewes claims to study something "the novel of our time does unceasingly" (6), yet inherent to that descriptor of "the novel" is a wide geographical generalization. Along with this, Bewes develops another argument, which holds that the more-or-less contemporary novel is not about connection, but rather about disconnection. [Extracted from the article]