In the last two decades, discussions of ‘precarity,’ ‘precariousness,’ and ‘precarisation’ have taken up a prominent space in critical and cultural discussions, especially in Euro-American scholarship, a prominence that is also reflected in the literary arena with the articulation of a cohesive body of works that has been designated ‘the literature of precarity’ or the ‘precarity novel’. There is, however, a significant gap in US literary fiction, one that this article argues is beginning to shift in recent years. After a consideration of what is implied by ‘precarity’ in contemporary discourse and how it translates into a distinct aesthetics of ‘precarious realism’—in particular, how the notion of ‘unhousing’ as physical displacement and affective divestment is pivotal to delineating its ideological permutations—the essay illustrates how the turn to precarity may be taking shape in recent US literature. It does so by considering, first, two novels usually associated with the US ‘novels of the crisis’ that emerged out of the 2007-2008 financial collapse, then turning its attention to Lynn Steger Strong’s Want (2020), a novel that is a clear departure from the former category and which can rightly be argued as a novel of precarity.
Dolores Resano (Mon,) studied this question.