“Things Can Always Be Otherwise”: Believing (in) Twenty-First-Century Fiction

Abstract What would a novelistic work look like that no longer solicited our belief? This article explores a shift in the historical conditions of narrative fiction focused on the notion of believability. The author argues that we risk missing a profound historical development—nothing less than a change in the belief structures of our world—when we limit our critical procedures to generic understandings of fiction's believability, ignoring practices by novelists that tell us that the very concept of believability that has long underpinned the category of fiction is itself no longer believable. The article uses two quite different US novels from 2010 to make this case: Tao Lin's Richard Yates and Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad. Both works, in different ways, suspend any notion of a “homology” between the world and the work and thereby give form to an absolute and irretrievable loss of belief.