The Novel After Theory by Judith Ryan (review)
regional frame, but the book's argument is most compelling when it adds dimensions of race and class, religious identification, and sexual orientation to that configuration, offering up a more nuanced discussion of the complex path of the southern intellectual. The reading of Tim McLaurin's working-class background, for instance, is especially effective in this regard. On the balance, Powell's interpretations are consistently crisp, her subjects well chosen and thoroughly contextualized; she is a fluid writer and her attitudes about the role of the intellectual are honest and perceptive. If the book doesn't necessarily reshape our thinking about the region at large, it does work as a rich, occasionally bracing, account of the tensions and textures of intellectual life in the South, and it belongs in any collection committed to its subjects.