The sky is falling and the novel is dead, so the doomsayers have proclaimed for years. Into this fray steps Fitzpatrick (Pomona College) with this intriguing study. Fitzpatrick avoids the obvious and tiresome argument and instead focuses on “what purposes the announcements of the death of print culture serve, and thus what all this talk about the end of the book tells us about those doing the talking.” In spite of the fact that book sales have never been more robust and all levels of the culture appear interested in and discuss books, writers especially often note the demise of print culture. Fitzpatrick examines what that obsession with extinction reveals about deeper anxieties at play in writers’ works. She builds on Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence (CH, Sep’73) and examines writers such as Don De Lillo and Thomas Pynchon for their concerns with the presumed dominance of nonprint media. Fitzpatrick is an adroit critic, and her use of contemporary theory is clever and interesting. This is important reading for anyone interested in postmodern culture or contemporary American fiction. Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals. – D. W. Madden, California State University, Sacramento

“Smart, savvy and insightful, The Anxiety of Obsolescence asks not whether the novel is obsolete but what cultural and social functions are served by that claim. Fitzpatrick makes a strong connection between the novel’s putative ‘endangered’ status and rear-guard actions to preserve white male hegemony. In so doing, she gives us a fresh and compelling perspective. The Anxiety of Obsolescence is essential reading for anyone interested in the postmodern novel.”
  —N. Katherine Hayles, Hillis Professor of Literature, University of California, Los Angeles, and author of My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts