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.
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