Eoin Flannery’s recent book Form, Affect and Debt in Post-Celtic Tiger Irish Fiction: Ireland in Crisis, published by Bloomsbury Press, is a highlight among multiple valuable contributions in Irish Studies to have come from that house in the last three years. The overlapping crises in the housing and global markets mean references to the uncanny are to be expected: the literary works under consideration emerge during a time in which the unheimlich is regnant. Covering a range of texts from mass market genre novels to experimental literary fiction, the book argues for a correlation of formal choices with thematic orientation, making its case that representational realism often aligns with a misdirected, reductive tendency towards individualized economic shaming; Flannery’s light touch contrasts with the heavy hands of some of the more moralizing novels. The book is thorough, careful, and well-constructed. When I encountered some of his ideas, via earlier article versions of a couple of the chapters, I recall concluding that his approach was so akin to my own that perhaps I should just tell my editor we did not need another piece on Deirdre Madden’s Time Present and Time Past. Fortunately, Form, Affect, and Debt is not the sort of book that makes definitive proclamations or forecloses further conversation. Rather, Flannery’s method opens out to further inquiry and analysis so that to spend time with his thoughts on a book one has agreed to discuss ultimately points to many fresh avenues of exploration.

Part of this proliferation arises from the seeming disjunction of the diverse organizing categories yoked together in his title. “Form” would speak to a particular type of scholar interested in the structural analyses of temporality, speculative grammatical modes, and attention to narrative focalization. (As this is a method that tends to be more generative with more formally adventurous works, this thread gains momentum as the volume progresses.) “Affect” would engage the attention of scholars who consider the psychoanalytic, attending here in particular to the iterations of shame in various recent novels. And “Debt” draws in those who want to explore the economic humanities, particularly through Marxist and biopolitical lenses. What is impressive about this volume is that Flannery manages to work via each approach without watering down any of them; he engages deeply with these diverse methodologies and makes the case for the necessity of intertwining them to make sense of Post-Celtic Tiger Fiction.

Each chapter spends time with one or two novels, gesturing as well to relevant intertexts and in one case making a gorgeous reading of Dennis O’Driscoll’s poem “The Celtic Tiger”. We begin (and I do mean “we”, as Flannery’s delightful and distinctive voice uses that as its primary pronoun) with Chris Binchy’s Open-handed and Peter Cunningham’s Capital Sins, two books that frown upon the excesses of the rich men in them, as does Dermot Bolger’s Tanglewood, the subject of chapter 2. This pair of chapters showcases Flannery’s ability to read generously – indeed more generously than his subjects. While largely critical of what he demonstrates to be a simplistic moralism from these authors, he also acknowledges what is done productively or well, as in his recognition that Tanglewood’s take opens out to enable reconsideration of what was (at the time of the novel’s publication) a less-examined but profound economic inequality during the boom. Similarly, Flannery’s careful dissection of the cultural dynamics of shame manages to draw on secondary sources while also offering critiques of them. This skill manifests as well in the introduction, which, for instance, makes Michael Lewis a point of entry before offering analysis of his “interventions” as “a breed of post-crash ‘dark tourism’, a titillatingly morbid rollcall of national economic failures” (6). With delightfully trenchant prose like this, Flannery’s textual analyses in the first half of the book develop an argument that straightforward realistic representation tends to be a blunt instrument for nuanced investigations of the dynamics of Irish inequality during and after the Tiger years.

Chapter 3, about Donal Ryan, treats The Thing about December and The Spinning Heart in turn. The analysis of the former novel is in keeping with the arguments of the earlier chapters, noting that its “unimaginative recourse to the inevitability of materialist progress acts as an alibi for greed” (83), while the latter novel leaves its “moral relationality […] incomplete”, thereby “depriv[ing] the reader of a degree of consolation and satisfaction” (93). In refusing the sort of “coalescence between the formal patterning of the narrative and rigidity of the moral economy therein” (20) that Flannery detects in more straightforwardly realist novels that “merely reiterate the language of […] consumerist voyeurism [and] eagerly fulfill readerly expectations” (38), The Spinning Heart also avoids the melodrama many readers associate with the bulk of Ryan’s work. If I have a complaint at all, it may be that the analogies Flannery makes between, for instance, the “focalizing asymmetry of Frank’s posthumous narrative” and the “structural asymmetries underlying the capitalist conjecture at the root of the locality’s acute impoverishment” (97) arise less from the novel than Flannery’s own insights; he lends Ryan a weight he may not have on his own.

Chapter 4 contributes an important and transferable reading of ghosts and haunting, here in Mount Merrion, wherein a dead child of the protagonist haunts the novel. Drawing on carefully constructed theoretical apparatus that includes Jed Esty, Walter Benjamin, Saskia Sassen, and David Lloyd, Flannery argues that the ghost is not about history but instead signals “a ghostly figurative alternative to the seemingly unassailable temporal dynamics of his father’s Ireland” (116). Ghosts are less vestiges of memory or a past we cannot set aside than gestures towards the proliferation of possibilities. Folding in Adorno and Horkheimer via Avery F. Gordon, Flannery neatly sets aside the default reading of ghosts as irrational traces to foreground how they indicate a respect outside of instrumentalized market value. At his strongest in an elegant analysis of the temporalities that Quinn deploys, Flannery deftly combines the textual and sociocultural to contest the inevitability narratives in which neoliberalism grounds itself, from Thatcher’s There Is No Alternative (TINA) to the justifications of austerity during the troika years.

Chapter 5, “Debt, Guilt, and Form”, feels like the conceptual heart of the book, using Maurizio Lazzarato to powerful effect. As elsewhere, Flannery manages to praise and bury – here the recipients are Roy Foster, PJ Mathews, and, most interestingly, Declan Kiberd, in whose boom era Revival he detects a “sense of inevitability palpable in [his] idealistic connection of cultural and economic achievement, and it rather blithely accepts at face value the ‘achievements’ of the Celtic Tiger economy. It signally fails to track the demoralizing human relations that undergird the cultures of indebtedness and obligation attendant to the kinds of economic activity regnant during the so-called economic ‘boom’” (134-5). The readings of O’Driscoll’s “The Celtic Tiger” and Claire Kilroy’s The Devil I Know show his dexterity in both poetry and prose, with temporal analysis again a standout, though the analysis of the pronouns is also noteworthy, especially given Flannery’s own attachment to “we”. He writes:

not only is the first-person singular absent, the first-person plural is also omitted, which, again, suggests physical, financial or ethical distance from these scenes of copious consumption, perhaps even a sense of disembodiment in the midst of such firmly expressed and experienced bodily and material(-ist) plenty. The poem’s narrative is relayed entirely in the second and third persons, intimating a degree of removal or separation from the depicted theatre of conspicuous wealth. (136)

The following chapter, on Madden’s Time Present and Time Past, cleverly links the uncanny and economic, with worthwhile attention to speculative grammars. Flannery finds much meaning in moments where the seemingly serene lives of the characters are roiled by eruptions of temporal discontinuity, “specifically through her utilization of anachrony, analepsis and prolepsis, and her suggestive deployment of tenses. Each of these accumulated technical innovations combine to problematize the apparent transparent realism of the narrative and, in fact, induce repeated moments of estrangement and uncanniness across the novel” (150), a condition Flannery links to the “common and necessary effects of financial capitalism” (161) with roots as far back as Marx’s discussions of the alienation of labor. Madden attends to financial conditions, but more importantly, to the way that financialization so thoroughly permeates the lives of her characters; in detailing the importance of this latter dimension, Flannery demonstrates further the limits of the didactic critiques of material excess in the novels examined earlier, enacting with his own readings a move beyond the flaws those books embody.

This brings us to the chapter that concludes the volume, on The Mark and the Void, Paul Murray’s underappreciated 2015 novel. (I would have loved a summative final chapter, or at least a coda.) Flannery engages with readerly expectations of realistic representation and shows how Murray avoids a character-driven plot that might offer us a false sense of understanding about the crash and finance more generally. “Thus in confronting the nature of ‘character’ in the fictionalization of finance, we are not just faced with a knotty formal problem, such considerations also bear upon the critical and ethical ambitions of any given work of finance fiction” (179). This section convincingly asserts the need for formal innovation. As the chapter proceeds, it shows how various sorts of self-reflexivity in the novel reveal the narratives that structure social norms and interactions, concluding with a defence of the necessity of metafiction alongside a recognition that shared physicality can create “the possibility for reconciliation at a moral level” (201). In closing with insights that yoke his three key terms, Flannery lands his contention that they operate best in concert. Those readers less keen on, say, the psychoanalytic readings of shame or unconvinced by affect theory or Marxian analysis may find themselves forced to concede how well the combination works.

The economic humanities have become an active corner of literary studies in the time since the global economic crisis that began in 2007. Too often, the tack taken is one in which a critic aligns with a text that has taken a moralizing tone, and they hector in unison, preaching to a sympathetic choir. Even when the analysis does more than act as a microphone to amplify an author’s message, it frequently follows the money in only the most literal of ways, treating a novel less as an aesthetic object than mere artefact, a reflective documentation of The Way We Live Now. Eoin Flannery shows the limitations of this mode of approach via a demonstration of the richness afforded by close textual analysis. At the end of the Ryan chapter, he notes that various scholars with various expertise have looked at the boom and subsequent austerity and delivered “multiple and contradictory” diagnoses (100), suggesting that with its tolerance for ambiguity and interest in subtlety, literature can supply more nuanced analyses. This book demonstrates that literary criticism can, too. Quantification can only carry us so far.