Reading for the Body: The Recalcitrant Materiality of Southern Fiction, 1893–1985 by Jay Watson (review)
ity. However, it might have been useful to establish this framework sooner; doing so would have provided a more solid foundation for Franco's extended meditation on the place—or absence—of ethics in discourses of race and rights. Further, by more fully articulating his own definition of terms like a "positive ethics of human care" and "responsibility," Franco would likely have enriched our understanding of his argument that in Shteyngart's Absurdistan, "all ethical impulses are corrupt from the start" (171). If the Kushner and Shteyngart chapters leave readers wanting a clearer understanding of Franconian ethics, the epilogue leaves little doubt as to how Franco sees his work advancing the cause of rights and recognition across ethnic and cultural divisions. The book closes with an account of Harriet Rochlin, whose recollections of life in mid-century Los Angeles provide an important example of crosscultural recognition and cooperation in action. Although pessimistic that we can return to the halcyon community of Rochlin's heyday, Franco expresses hope that academia might provide a substitute site on which "the cooperative multiracial spirit" might be rekindled (205). The conclusion of the book, then, is a call to action and, more specifically, an enjoinder to Jewish American scholars to "advance a broad social understanding of how we narrate difference in the United States" (207). It is this call for an "ethics of intervention" that makes Franco's contribution such a valuable one.