The Constellational Novel

A constellational novel is a novel that has an associative, essayistic, digressive, and densely patterned prose form. The Constellational Novel aims to shed light on the field of contemporary literature by offering a definitive theory of the constellational novel. These novels are recognizable by the presence of a first-person narrator committed to drawing affinities and making connections among disparate things.

Beginning with Marcel Proust, Klee's argument focuses on novels published over roughly the last two decades (between 2001 and 2020) by writers such as W. G. Sebald, Lisa Robertson, Teju Cole, Jacqueline Rose, and Olga Tokarczuk. Strikingly, it is often assumed that the attunement of their narrators to an unfolding web of potential interconnections holds an ethical promise of new ways of relating to oneself, others, and the world. Klee considers this implication of ethics and associative form to be peculiar and, in some important respects, unprecedented in the history of the novel.

How is recognizing connections between things ethical, exactly? Could it not simply be the working of a resourceful or possibly even deranged intelligence, one that obsessively sees patterns everywhere? Why should the value of literature hinge on such an idiosyncratic process? And what does finding affinities have to do with the more familiar categories of novelistic form, like character and narrative? Taking inspiration from the work of Walter Benjamin, this book analyzes the distinctive ethics of affinity offered by these novels, and thus seeks to clarify one of the most intriguing and consequential developments in the contemporary novel.