Louis Klee, The Constellational Novel (Oxford University Press, 2025).
Institutional affiliation: University of Cambridge
This is an original, significant and rigorous piece of scholarship on the relationship between the contemporary novel and ethics. It offers a theoretically incisive examination of a new kind of novel form, what the author labels the ‘constellational novel’: ‘By constellational form, I mean something quite specific: an associative, essayistic, and densely patterned mode of prose writing, one that is recognizable by the presence of a first-person narrator committed to drawing affinities and making connections among disparate things’ (Klee, 2025, p.3). Throughout, it weighs in on many important problematics and makes new contributions to questions concerning narrative form, the relations between narrators and readers, and so on.
In addition to opening up new ways to think about the contemporary novel and reading, Klee’s monograph is significant in bringing together ideas of novel form allied to ethics, and a phenomenology of reading that focuses on association and affinity rather than characterological alterity. It is rigorous in terms of its intellectual scope and the way in which it models constellational modes of reading through engagement with a set of inter-related and highly allusive primary texts (Proust, Sebald, Teju Cole, Lisa Robertson).
The monograph consists of an initial theoretical and critical chapter followed by intensive readings of the constellational novels under consideration alongside extensive reference to works, philosophical, critical and creative, that respond to these works with their own constellations (e.g. Jacqueline Rose’s Albertine, a response to Proust’s La prisonnière (The Captive); Teju Cole’s Open City viewed as a response to a Sebaldian ethics of witnessing in the face of trauma). The epilogue returns to Olga Tokarczuk’s Nobel Prize lecture and her novel Flights to discuss the kind of ‘new’ novel form needed now: ‘a first-person narrator oriented toward an expansive web of affinities offers the most compelling route to the “fourth-person” in the field of the contemporary novel’ (p.169). In short, this is a learned, deeply researched, theoretically astute piece of scholarship.
