The Leftovers ERIC BERLATSKY, The Real, the True, and the Told: Postmodern Historical Narrative and the Ethics of Representation (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2011), pp. 250, cloth, $49.95. Reality is one of the few words which mean nothing without quotes. Vladimir Nabokov Quotation marks around the term “real,” standard for any discussion of reality in a postmod- ern context, are perhaps not as necessary as they appear. Eric Berlatsky Postmodernism, the artistic movement, the cultural theory, the mode of reading, has passed on. Not William Faulkner’s hanging-around-galloping past, but passed-past. The dominant idea of our age appears to hold less and less footing in contemporary cultural debates—or at least one would think, given the persistent stream of eulogies for postmodernism, begin- ning in the late 1990s, which have declared its recent or impending demise. The historical- postmodern is on display in venues as diverse as the Victoria and Albert Museum’s 2011 precisely dated retrospective, “Postmodernism—Style and Subversion 1970–1990,” and the Marxist Literary Group’s marquee panel “The Novel after Postmodernism” at the 2012 Modern Language Association conference. Along with the emergence in critical theory of the assuredly short-lived post-postmodernism, the ield’s postmortems bespeak an inter- est in locating a new term for our new literary sensations, as it were. In this context, Eric Berlatsky’s studious book on postmodernism’s unsettled relationship to history in the twentieth-century novel, The Real, the True, and the Told: Postmodern Historical Narrative and the Ethics of Representation, could well be read as literary history, a documentary return to our very recent past. On the contrary, and much to my surprise, Berlatsky’s book revitalizes key debates over the materiality of the historical “reference” in postmodern narratives, the ethics undergirding the explicitly parodic and self-referential postmodern text, and the relationship between the coextensive discourses of post-structuralism, postcolonialism, and postmodernism. In inding the postmodernist pulse still beating, Berlatsky reigures the capabilities and deicits ascribed to postmodern literature, drawing in more texts and a broader array of philosophical and historical ideas to confront the “ethical stand” of the postmodern text that is “based on a reference to the real” (49). There has for some time been a desire in contemporary theory and criticism to move beyond the oppositional and largely institutional divisions between history and textual- ity, a binary that sees novels either as capable of representing the historical “real” or, in Berlatsky’s formulation, as inding the real “foreclosed in favor of the models of endless textuality” (8). The search for a middle way, as Berlatsky argues, reveals a “desperate yearn- ing for the materiality of the referent” (163) at the heart of much contemporary theory. Berlatsky’s project begins by thus disabusing us of the notion of the purely parodic or end- less self-referential postmodern text, tracing the institutional “turns” (linguistic, historical, ethical) in postmodernism in order to historicize and critique the somewhat whimsical Novel Published by Duke University Press