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Marni Gauthier. Amnesia and Redress in Contemporary American Fiction. New York: Palgrave, 2011. xii + 253 pp.
Marni Gauthier opens Amnesia and Redress in Contemporary American Fiction with a riveting portrait of conferences, criminal tribunals, and commissions that were convened in the 1990s and the first decade of the 2000s whose purpose was to reexamine historical acts of violence in order to "establish a public record of truth" (4). These events, Gauthier argues, exemplify the political climate of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries-a climate in which the tension between "a particularly American forgetting" and a widespread concern for "truth-telling" and official apology play out with marked consequences for American fiction (3). Gauthier considers these consequences across a set of contemporary novels, demonstrating the ways that they treat "subjugated histories" amidst and against this backdrop of historical violence and more recent truthtelling. The result of Gauthier's research is a compelling argument for "a new literary movement" beyond postmodernism-a genre of contemporary historical fiction that draws upon documentary material to work against amnesia and transform painful histories "into a memory experienced and possessed" (22-23).
Gauthier tracks the ways that this transformation occurs in a range of novels-from canonical postmodern works by Don DeLillo and Toni Morrison to lesser-known texts by Michelle Cliff, Bharati Mukherjee, and Julie Ostuka. While she situates her project in relation to the critical movement seeking to challenge the postmodernist claim to ahistoricity, Gauthier is more concerned with the "distinctive truth claims of the historical referents" on which these postmodern narratives draw (19). Attentive and insightful, Gauthier's analyses of these texts proceed by way of historical excavation. She uncovers the significant research informing novels such as DeLillo's Underworld (1997) and Cliff's Free Enterprise (1993) and closely attends...