On Endings: American Postmodern Fiction and the Cold War (review)
conclusion or intention. Instead, Foley's methodology implies the historical contingency of all literary production and questions the arbitrary mark of publication; that is, to understand the residues in a novel, we must unearth the corrections, redactions, and revisions that deposited these sediments. Foley shows that we have misunderstood Ellison because we failed to consider the corrective, yet sedimenting effects of WWII-Communist Party policy and Cold War antiradicalism that produced the Invisible Man that sits on our shelves. Second, Foley builds on her earlier work to demonstrate the ineradicable presence of Leftist politics in virtually all twentieth-century American literature. Whereas Radical Representations examines Mike Gold, Jack Conroy, Grace, Lumpkin, Josephine Herbst—a litany of writers discarded by "apolitical" Cold War formalism and still widely ignored—Wrestling with the Left brings to the ring a solidly canonized exemplar of nonpolitical modernism. In doing so, Foley reveals not only the centrality of political formation and transformation, but also the specific importance of socialism and Communism. No longer a curious subgenre as it was in 1993, Foley's latest work shows that "radical literature" and a radical orientation to literature are essential parts of the study of every American novel touched by the Great Depression, the international antifascist movement, World War II, and the Cold War. These events required writers to engage with various constructions of the Left, and we have not yet made visible all the faintly indelible marks these constructions have left.