The End of the 90s in Porochista Khakpour's The Last Illusion, Rachel Kushner's The Mars Room and Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation

Keeble, Arin

Abstract

This article argues that three contemporary novels – Porochista Khakpour's The Last Illusion (2014), Rachel Kushner's The Mars Room (2017), and Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018) – offer correctives to prevalent histories of the American 1990s that depict this period as a time of stability, tolerance, and optimism. These novels offer specific vectors of critique, attending to the advance of social and cultural forms of neoliberalism, popular notions of the “alternative” or liberal 90s, and address a sequence of ruptures and social turbulence preceding “9/11” – often seen as the abrupt conclusion of the “long 90s.” Additionally, the historical narratives of these novels each build in depictions of the September 11 attacks, which decenter them and question the exceptionalization of this event. I argue for the value in reading these novels together and demonstrate how they speak to and mirror each other in productive ways.

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: May 6, 2022
• Online Publication Date: May 27, 2022
• Publication Date: 2023
• Deposit Date: May 31, 2022
• Publicly Available Date: May 31, 2022
• Journal: Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction
• Print ISSN: 0011-1619
• Electronic ISSN: 1939-9138
• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 64
• Issue: 4
• Pages: 685-698
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/00111619.2022.2078179
• Public URL: http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/Output/2872345