Caitlin Forster

Checkout 19 uses the movements of allusion to trace the contours of a future that it never claims to quite grasp, keeping the novel ajar to future possibility.

Thus, Checkout 19 demonstrates the narrator’s accretive understanding of the world through literary texts, depicts her coming to terms with this inheritance, and simultaneously inducts the reader into a borrowed way of seeing, as if offering us fresh literary tools through which to read our own presents and futures.

The novel returns repeatedly to the idea that when we read, write and act in the world, we might be channelling something older than ourselves: finding one’s own contemporary life anticipated in literature, ‘exactly as if you are at last speaking your own mind – now, finally, you are saying something you have for so long struggled to say’.16

While the time of global neoliberal capitalism may be defined by instantaneity – the extended present, the eroded future – the novel, a form involving the extended mediation of the world, is an instrument for thinking about time that runs directly counter to the logic of the instant, granting it sophisticated critical capabilities.15A little... See more

Indeed, Mathias Nilges has argued that the time of neoliberalism need not represent the time of the novel’s exhaustion but in fact of its renewal and most promising activity.14

Moreover, in recent years there has been some significant consideration of how a twenty-first century era of ‘precarity’ – involving the casualisation of work, the removal of job securities, and a resulting anxiety about an unplannable future – might inflect the temporalities of various art forms, including the novel.11 To put it somewhat vulgarly,... See more

In fact, the problem of how fiction might think futurity has become somewhat acute in the contemporary period. The cultural difficulty with conceiving alterity that Mark Fisher once associated with a critical underfunding in the arts has hardly diminished in the intervening years of the twenty-first century; this is perhaps especially true in the... See more

That Y2K brand of irony – glib, evasive, laddish – is gone. Good riddance to it. It’s hard to be flippant when you know which way the arc of the universe really bends.

That brief window – before 9/11, smartphones and the chokehold of autofiction – when the novel felt as playful as it did expansive: bold and baggy as wide-legged jeans.