Discrepant Solace: Contemporary Literature and the Work of Consolation

Consolation has always played an uncomfortable part in the literary history of loss. But in recent decades its affective meanings and ethical implications have been recast by narratives that appear at first sight to foil solace altogether. Illuminating this striking archive, Discrepant Solace considers writers who engage with consolation not as an aesthetic salve but as an enduring problematic, one that unravels at the centre of emotionally challenging works of late twentieth- and twenty-first-century fiction and life-writing. The book understands solace as a generative yet conflicted aspect of style, where microelements of diction, rhythm, and syntax capture consolation's alternating desirability and contestation. With a wide-angle lens on the contemporary scene, David James examines writers who are rarely considered in conversation, including Sonali Deraniyagala, Colson Whitehead, Cormac McCarthy, W.G. Sebald, Doris Lessing, Joan Didion, J. M. Coetzee, Marilynne Robinson, Julian Barnes, Helen Macdonald, Ian McEwan, Colm Tóibín, Kazuo Ishiguro, Denise Riley, and David Grossman. These figures overturn critical suppositions about consolation's kinship with ideological complaisance, superficial mitigation, or dubious distraction, producing unsettling perceptions of solace that shape the formal and political contours of their writing. Through intimate readings of novels and memoirs that explore seemingly indescribable experiences of grief, trauma, remorse, and dread, James demonstrates how they turn consolation into a condition of expressional possibility without ever promising us relief. He also supplies vital traction to current conversations about the stakes of thinking with contemporary writing to scrutinize affirmative structures of feeling, revealing unexpected common ground between the operations of literary consolation and the urgencies of cultural critique. Discrepant Solace makes the close reading of emotion crucial to understanding the work literature does in our precarious present.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: Consolation's Discrepant Forms 1: Fetched from Oblivion 2: Description as Redress 3: Elegy Unrestored 4: The Religion of Style 5: Life-Righting and Magical Thinking 6: Apprehensive Alleviation 7: Walking with the Unconsoled Epilogue: Bribes of Aesthetic Pleasure?

About the Author :
David James is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literature at the University of Birmingham. Among his other books are Sentimental Activism (2026) and Modernist Futures (2012), along with edited volumes such as Modernism and Close Reading (2020), The Cambridge Companion to British Fiction since 1945 (2015), and The Legacies of Modernism (2012). He is an editor at Contemporary Literature and is founding co-editor of the Columbia University Press series Literature Now.

Review :
In the face of illness, grief, trauma, catastrophe -- why write? Can consolation be found in works that seem to be about inconsolability? These are the urgent questions that propel David James' remarkable study of twenty-first century narrative fiction and memoir. The answers that James provides do full justice to the emotional depth as well as the analytic complexity of a body of contemporary writing that ranges from Kazuo Ishiguro to J.M. Coetzee, from W.G. Sebald to Joan Didion, from Marilynne Robinson to David Grossman... This is a book that skillfully and rewardingly attends to the micro-effects of prosody, while forging a new direction for the critical understanding of elegy, grief writing, trauma studies and post-modern fiction. David James challenges the association of aesthetic consolation with distraction and comfort, showing instead how contemporary literature provides solace through the detailed description of loss and devastation. Discrepant Solace not only analyzes this paradox but instantiates it. In addressing the ethics of representing bleak experience, James has written a work of criticism that is not only intellectually challenging but also beautiful and deeply moving. To console us is one of the oldest tasks of literature, but it is also, of late, one of the most neglected. Literature should challenge us, estrange us, beguile us, but very few make the case that it should make us feel better. David James' brilliantly subtle and poetically attentive book responds to this critical lacuna, by offering a new way of understanding how today's literature consoles. There is nothing sentimental about this book -- James does not offer a cosy picture of the redemptive qualities of the literary imagination; rather he addresses some of the contemporary writers whose work is most difficult, most uncompromising. But in doing so, he produces a startlingly original way of thinking about how the beauty of style overcomes some of the deprivations it witnesses, an account of the reparations of literary form that will have a transformative effect on how we think about the contemporary novel. Dazzling analyses ... are on display in every chapter of Discrepant Solace. It honestly contains some of the best close reading being done on contemporary literature right now. ... The individual readings are exquisite. Even in its failure, it turns out, consolation does mobilize stylistic ingenuities that fully repay the careful scrutiny to which James subjects them.