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This chapter asks what happens to ‘the quiet novel’ in the noisy environment of the city. Through a discussion of two strikingly similar debut novels by Teju Cole and Ben Lerner, this chapter first examines historical and cultural notions of urban noise and, second, asks how Cole and Lerner integrate the din of the city into the body of their quiet texts. In this, the chapter asks what kinds of information can be read as quiet and what exactly determines a novel’s volume.

Writing about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, contemporary United States–based poets Mónica de la Torre, Ben Lerner, Philip Metres, Claudia Rankine, Juliana Spahr, and C. D. Wright have repurposed the news media’s logic of juxtaposition and simultaneity and civilian poets’ meta-rhetorical strategies from the 1930s and 1940s. Recent scholarship has not yet attended to how U.S. civilian poets use these strategies to critique war culture in the twenty-first century. This chapter argues that an ethically motivated self-distrust that sees itself seeing has become the prima materia of an important strand of civilian war poetry today. Some contemporary poets use rhetoric to craft texts that cultivate connectivity rather than expressing oratorical postures of authority, while others aim to bring together the experiences of soldier and civilian through collaborative projects. Both modes reinforce the notion that witnessing war in the flesh affords special knowledge.

Since the posthumous publication of 2666 in Spanish in 2004 and of the English translations of Distant Star (2004), The Savage Detectives (2007), and 2666 (2008), the novels of Roberto Bolaño—and their central figure, the reader-experiencer—have provided one of the most important models for writers in both the English- and Spanish-speaking worlds. As US authors are reading more Latin American literature than ever, Latin American authors are increasingly writing about their “experience” of the United States. After analyzing contemporary works by Latina/o writers composing in English in the United States, including Francisco Goldman, Ana Menéndez, and Junot Díaz; by non-Latina/o US writers such as Ben Lerner and Kenneth Goldsmith; and by Spanish-language writers such as Mexican-born novelist Valeria Luiselli and Puerto Rican poet Mara Pastor, the book ends by considering how recent works in the literatures of the Americas might point toward new literary possibilities in the future.

In conclusion, this short chapter surveys the ways in which the novelists discussed in this book have become reference points for contemporary debates about the legacy of modernism and experimentation among novelists such as Teju Cole, Zadie Smith, and Ben Lerner. It also surveys how contemporary novelists’ engagements with art are being driven by different concerns than those of earlier writers—attempts to blur the lines between autobiography and fiction, or to recover the political and aesthetic potential of wonder and enchantment. In doing so, it shows how the interactions between art and the novel traced in this book have become part of literary history.