The artists are at a dinner party gossiping about a dead woman. They say it was an overdose. Her mother doubts whether it was a suicide, but the unnamed narrator of Zoe Dubno’s Happiness and Love (2025) never questions it. Rebecca, a failed actress, had been a fixture in the art scene of Dimes Square, the Lower East Side neighborhood where the novel takes place. She acted in small plays, but she never made it onto the big screen like the Old Hollywood actresses she idolized. The last time the narrator had seen Rebecca perform, and they were close once, was a one-woman show in which Rebecca wept in a “faux-vulnerable confessional act about her madness about her troubled past,” already suggesting a panic about precedent. Rebecca confessed that “the entire construction of herself that she had been peddling up to that point was an act.”
People didn’t get it. The show closed after a few performances.
The last time the narrator ever saw Rebecca, tinted bottles of tranquilizers littered the floor of her apartment — meticulously staged, a way to channel “tragedy-era” Marlene Dietrich as she ate dinner off of cardboard boxes. In a psychological crisis, Rebecca asked repeatedly, “How do I know that I exist, how can I be sure that I exist, who is Rebecca, Rebecca, who is Rebecca.”
The actress’ suicidal plight, beleaguered by her compulsion and failure to imitate the past, might be read as the subconscious of Dubno’s novel as a literary project; it’s a remake that has so painstakingly copied Thomas Bernhard’s Woodcutters (1984) that it is unsure whether it — her novel, as an entity — exists. Dubno takes the same structure and plot from Woodcutters, about a writer-narrator at a dinner party who eviscerates the hosts and guests in his mind as they wait for the arrival of a celebrated actor. Both are comedies of manners for their respective art scenes: Bernhard’s of 1980s Vienna and Dubno’s of today’s New York. Both novels are written in a single paragraph, a trademark of Bernhard’s style. Dubno also copies his frequent and idiosyncratic use of italics for humor. She even replicates Bernhard’s anadiplosis, the use of the last word in a clause at the beginning of the next.
We have seen a lot of these novel remakes lately. Last year, Italian writer Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection arrived in English, a shot-for-shot remake of Georges Perec’s Things set in 2010s Berlin instead of Perec’s 1960s Paris. Both novels tell the story of a middle-class couple who can exercise their freedom only through hyper-specific consumer choices. But for what reads like dutiful apprentice work, Latronico’s novel, at least, did pretty well for itself. Sophie Hughes’ translation was shortlisted for the 2025 International Booker Prize, and Latronico himself was profiled in the New York Times. This may hardly have been his intent, but transcribing old novels into contemporary versions seems to be one of today’s surefire roads to literary acclaim.
Percival Everett, whose novel James (2024) is a retelling of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), won the 2024 National Book Award for Fiction and the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Justin Torres’ Blackouts (2023), an adaptation of Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman (1976), won the 2023 National Book Award. Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead (2022), an adaptation of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield (1850), won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize. It seems there’s a worry about forgetting. And we’ve got a lot of required reading to do.
Of course, the literary remake is nothing new. Shakespeare borrowed most of his plots. James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) was an adaptation of Homer, in the way that the Aeneid (19 B.C.) was also an adaptation of Homer. Remakes will have varying relationships to their historical models. With the Aeneid, Virgil sought to preserve what he saw as the best of Greek literature to invigorate Roman national myths. Don Quixote (1605), in which Quixote tries to fashion himself after Amadis of Gaul (1508), explored the inadequacies of history, mostly the comic assimilation of Spanish romantic culture in contemporary Spain. Don Quixote is often considered the first modern novel, not because it’s the first work of narrative prose fiction, which might be something like the Satyricon (c. 60 A.D.), but because Cervantes introduced modern sensibilities of dailiness and realism. In Imitating Authors (2019), a study of imitatio, or writers imitating works of the past, Colin Burrow writes how Don Quixote, the hero, fails (unintentionally) to imitate the knight Amadis in speeches and rituals, and is cornered into becoming his own person. Don Quixote, the novel, fails (intentionally) to imitate the chivalric romances, and births a new art form. Imitation is hardwired into the history of the novel, whose very capacity to innovate is driven by its childlike desire to imitate the old.
Whether today’s remakes present anything new, or whether they care to, depends on their relationship with history. Happiness and Love and Perfection repeat highly stylized forms to create stylistically unoriginal novels. Blackouts takes, as a gesture, the main relationship in Puig’s novel as its scaffold and adds a handful of new gestures, like blackout poetry and uncollected stories from Harper’s and the New Yorker. Yet while these novels are ostensibly remakes of the past, they are also social novels about our time. James uses the container of Twain’s classic to smuggle in contemporary themes like code-switching, the magical negro bias, and reparations. Demon Copperhead attempts to establish itself as a definitive, comprehensive social novel — as Dickens had — of white working-class conditions during the opioid crisis in Appalachia.
A tremor seems to run through these works, as they glance backward toward history. Our political crisis today is often framed as a struggle with the past. The MAGA movement is largely run on nostalgic fantasies of when the boomer generation enjoyed the largest period of economic growth in the last century. Cultural panics about when to date the country’s founding, like Nikole Hannah-Jones’s 1619 Project (2019), ignited a nationwide backlash against critical race theory in schools.
This groping onto the guardrails of history suggests an insecurity of our times. After stagnant decades of unquestioned American dominance, we have arrived at a time when history is moving again. Does it look like it’s going backward? The acceleration of artificial intelligence is replacing white-collar labor, while cryptocurrency has conjured trillions of dollars out of nothing. Liberal democracy is in crisis. Network states, colonizing land in Honduras and elsewhere, are evolving as a political reality, replacing the republic with something like a shareholders meeting. Conservative political philosophers argue for a return to pre-Enlightenment models of a monarchic and authoritarian rule, directly influencing the ideologies of the Trump administration.
And this is to say nothing yet of the internet. We have seen, from the invention of woodblock printing in China in the seventh century and of the printing press in Europe in the 15th century, that changes in the distribution of information precipitate radical social, political, and religious revolutions. The downstream effects of internet communication have defined the revolutions of our times. These changes can be read through our novels, which — like fashion or recommended videos on YouTube that indiscriminately span various periods of history — don’t seem to know what year it is. The reason our novels are rehashing the past is because they can no longer tell what the future looks like.
One is tempted to hold Perfection up with Things, and Happiness and Love up with Woodcutters, to see how many sentences were directly lifted from their predecessors, with the nouns swapped out but the verbs kept in place. To copy all the sentences, swap all the nouns, but keep the verbs would be, so to speak, an argument that decades later — four for Dubno, and six for Latronico — individuals and institutions have changed but social relations have stayed the same. This is a conservative view of history. The narrator of Happiness and Love says of Rebecca, the actress who killed herself, “She was a genius for the spectacle,” casting the artist as a fantasy of humanism in a neoliberal society where there can be no human flourishing outside capitalism. Even as early as Society of the Spectacle (1967), Guy Debord wrote, “In both form and content the spectacle serves as a total justification of the conditions and goals of the existing system,” conditions that rest on “the institutionalization of the social division of labor in the form of class divisions.”
We are three decades out from when Francis Fukuyama, in The End of History and the Last Man (1992), declared that history had ended with the fall of the Soviet Union, and that the marriage between capitalism and liberal democracy was God’s ultimate masterpiece. Who else in this society but artists and creatives could supply the justifying myth that monetizing one’s life, mind, and work can be fun, and full of quirky personalities, in our forever-times of capitalism (we can drop the “late” already)? Dubno writes that today’s artists both know to use the word “neoliberal in a derisive tone,” even if it’s “the exact same rubric of neoliberal achievement they too [follow].” The narrator calls them “failures,” repeatedly — failures trying to follow the script, no longer relevant, of today’s neoliberal economy, itself a failed remake of Reagan-era neoliberalism. Capitalism, long propagandized throughout the Cold War as necessarily linked to democracy, keeps getting remade, but the remakes aren’t working.
György Lukács argued in History and Class Consciousness (1923) that the modern conception of history was invented by popular democracy: the product of the sociopolitical transformations brought about by the French Revolution. Before the ancien régime was toppled in France, peasants in feudal society were excluded from the movements of history, because, without suffrage, they were alienated from the decisions of the state. But after the French Revolution gave many peasants the right to vote and to intervene in political matters, history now included the common man as well as the aristocrat.
Yet today, liberal democracy is in crisis because human flourishing isn’t compatible with neoliberal capitalism. By Lukács’s definition, history has stalled — we’re now in its recap episode. When Rebecca, the actress in Happiness and Love, cries to the narrator, “Do I even exist,” one imagines this to be the cry of liberalism itself, of history.
In James, Percival Everett’s retelling of Mark Twain’s novel from Jim’s point of view, the runaway slave (who has learned to read by stealing library books) dreams that he has several dialogues with European philosophers, in the tradition of French writer Lahontan’s Dialogues With a Savage (1703). To Voltaire, Jim says, “You have a notion, like Raynal, of natural liberties, and we all have them by virtue of our being human. But when those liberties are put under societal and cultural pressure, they become civil liberties, and those are contingent on hierarchy and situation.”
Yet what Jim posits to Voltaire is that rights — human or civil — can’t be universally enforced, because they’re dependent upon hierarchy and situation (such as merchant classes, the aristocracy, and civil rights). Yet those civil liberties — of immigrants, trans people, activists — are fraying, because democracy is buckling under societal rank and inequalities. In America today, the Enlightenment separation between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches is getting eroded. In a dissenting Supreme Court opinion for Trump v. CASA, Inc. (2025), Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said, “Eventually, executive power will become completely uncontainable, and our beloved constitutional Republic will be no more.”
The Hegelian view here would be the optimistic view: that democracy, meeting its existential antithesis in fascism, will die and be reborn as a synthesis of the two. That American democracy needs to die, in order to resurrect through a progress of spirit, is allegorized by Everett in the form of a catfish. While Jim and Huck are on the run, Jim catches a catfish that weighs “fifty pounds” and is “too much for any two people to eat” — like 50 states too many for any two parties to govern. Jim narrates, “When the fish tried to eat my hand I was to shove it down his throat and pull him free of the water.” Jim reaches in and hauls it out by its guts: “The animal popped free of its muddy home and came shooting forth, head, gills and tail, clean out of the water.” Twice, here, we note the conjoining of the word “free” (civil liberties) with the death of the 50-pound animal (American democracy).
As Jim’s arm is in the mouth of the fish, he has a hallucinatory vision in which John Locke tells him to imagine American history not as democratic progress but “all as a state of war.” He replies:
“If I am in a war, then I have the right to fight back. That follows, doesn’t it? I have a right, perhaps a duty, to kill my enemy.”
“Well, now.” [This can be read as, “Well, now let’s be sensible.”]
“My enemy is those who would kill me. Am I correct, John?”
“Well, now.” [This can be read as, “Well, now that’s correct.”]
We are far now from the Enlightenment ideals of free and universal human beauty, shared by what Kant, incredibly, referred to as the “world community.” What James posits here is a world where brutality and strength, not beauty, are the basic premise of the human, and rights are derived from the condition of war. This might align with something like The Shield of Achilles (2002), where the constitutional scholar Philip Bobbitt argues that every major evolution in the structure of statehood has come about by what he terms “epochal wars.” The French Revolution required a large national army, larger than the mercenary forces of Europe’s existing states, to install liberal democracy and then enforce it. If Everett stops just short of advocating armed rebellion, it is because the country is already embroiled in a state of war: class warfare, culture wars, gridlock. In our own epochal conflict, Trump has declared all-out war against immigrants, universities, free trade, Palestine, trans rights, and NATO in one fell swoop. What we might be seeing is a reversion to the warring tribes of the Dark Ages, after the Roman Empire was picked apart by barbarians. During this time, the Roman past was forgotten because its literature was not preserved. Erich Auerbach, in Mimesis (1946), tracks this forgetting through the historical literature of the Dark Ages, in its inability to imitate the past. Gregory of Tours, the bishop who wrote History of the Franks (c. 594 A.D.), wrote in unpolished Latin because he wanted to write in classical Latin, but couldn’t. Literacy had vanished because education had collapsed. There was no notion of civic education. There was no notion of a republic.
In Perfection, Latronico presents a view of history where the technological revolution of artificial intelligence will, outside the forces of democracy, render an entire labor force obsolete. These are members of the white-collar creative class who pay for Photoshop. Like an iPhone hitting low power mode by lunch, Anna and Tom fret about their own obsolescence. Latronico cleverly describes Anna and Tom’s jobs as founded upon “the notion that individuality manifested itself as a set of visual differences, immediately decodable and in constant need of updating.” This is of course a description of AI image generation, which trains on and draws from billions of pictures, predictable trends, and results to produce images. Anna and Tom wonder, toward the end of the novel, “how long it would be before a neural network could carry out most of their work.”
Here is the Marxist idea that the material forces of production, not ideology or identity, shape history. In Demon Copperhead, the coal miners in the Appalachian mountains of Virginia have largely been put out of work by industrialization. Demon, who is mixed-race with white ancestors, narrates, “Deep-hole mines went to strip mines, then to blowing the heads off whole mountains, with machines to pick up the pieces,” making his land “the butthole of the job universe.” Demon learns this when Mr. Armstrong, a middle school teacher, assigns his students a “Backgrounds” project to look into the history of their people. Mr. Armstrong, who is Black, cites how Virginia had voted to join the Confederacy in solidarity with the plantation owners, but it was the working-class mountaineers, the narrator’s white ancestors, who fought on the side of the Union. Black people had originally flocked to places like Lee County for coal jobs, but when the mining jobs were replaced by industrialization, they moved to places like Chicago, leaving behind the mountaineers who stayed and suffered mass layoffs. This history, shoehorned into an actual history lesson in the novel, shows how Black and white people are historic allies united against business tycoons. It’s also a fable of how the Black working class ascended to become the middle-class and new face of the Democratic Party, which had largely left the white working class behind. The reason Mr. Armstrong arrived in Lee County was to be part of a program “where people from the city come help you out for being poor,” Demon narrates. Here, Mr. Armstrong plays ambassador from an educated, urban, and non-white middle-class to poor white miners addicted to opiates.
Virginia, as Kingsolver’s model minority, has voted blue for the past five election cycles, though the last of them saw record numbers of white working-class voters swinging to the right. Identity politics was quickly scapegoated on the left. “One of the main responsibilities of socialists now is to openly and vocally criticize the woke left,” Vivek Chibber said on a 2025 episode of the podcast Doomscroll. This invective is based on two grounds: one, identity politics placed its concerns on workplace discrimination in middle-class professions, abandoning the labor reforms sought by working-class unions, and two, identity politics alienated the white working class by scolding them for being bigots. “Because the public hates the woke left,” Chibber adds, “it puts socialists on a very difficult footing, because they’re painted with the same brush as critical race theory, as poststructuralism, as postcolonial theory.”
This schism is also reflected in Justin Torres’ Blackouts. To read the novel is to see how, over the past century, the politics of queer people and Puerto Ricans were entangled with workers and migrants but have somehow left them behind over time. The surrealist novel is narrated through conversations between two gay Puerto Ricans. Juan is an older man repeatedly hospitalized for a racist pathology called Puerto Rican Syndrome. Nene is a younger sex worker from “bumfuck nowhere,” who was possibly committed, years earlier, for the same reason. They live, temporarily but indefinitely, in an abandoned insane asylum called the “Palace,” which seems to exist only in dream space. There is no year or country. Money and work are of no concern. Identity is the center of all activity and preoccupation. Juan and Nene’s conversations revolve around a book Juan has found, Sex Variants (1941), which collects oral histories of queer people gathered by the lesbian activist Jan Gay and eventually co-opted by psychiatrist George W. Henry to medically pathologize homosexuality, erasing Gay’s authorship.
A familiar historical trend emerges wherein queer identity tries to declare itself, and is appropriated and weaponized by straight, white, and male culture, against its own best interests. As a way of explicitly recuperating queer history, Torres’ novel is suspicious of queer people’s place in history. The novel is mostly written in vignettes, out of order and without context, in the style of Puerto Rican writer Jesús Colón, who “wrote in vignettes, each a slice of life — the evocation of a single moment — and in this way, avoided the error of dogma and grand narratives.” Dogma and grand narratives have historically been unkind to queer people. Nene recalls, “The straight culture turned its attention to our culture, and the sudden increased visibility of course provoked a backlash.” In the United States, gay liberation has historically been co-opted, and scapegoated, as the cause célèbre for a reactionary right. During the culture wars of the ’90s, conservatives used the explicit imagery of gay artists like Robert Mapplethorpe to rally a moral panic during the AIDS crisis. In the last decade, the fight for transition care for minors was mobilized in much the same way to galvanize anti-trans conservatives. The playbook held that class expresses itself through identity, and identity through culture; so if politics is downstream from culture, then culture is where history moves.
And so Torres exhibits an anxiety of being seen. The Palace takes its name from a typo in a memo on Gay’s medical examinations of queer people, miswriting “place of observation” as “palace of observation.” Here, the Palace exhibits queerness as an object subjected to a (straight, male, and medicalized) gaze. Rather than a modality of relation, identity is something to be seen and then trapped in an image. As if to say, this is what that gaze has done to identity: sequestered and alienated it from history into some permanent, ethereal haunting, floating in space. “In the Palace, I lost track of time, not just of the hours and dates, but also of a certain sense of the temporal,” Nene recalls. The culture wars have successfully cut identity loose from relations of production and reduced it to a psychoanalytic matter, privatizing identity into the personal. Out of the coal mines and into the human psyche, identity politics, even if still collective, becomes alienated from the concerns of workers and preoccupied with affective goals like respect, dignity, and self-actualization. This is the right to happiness over the right to property.
Thus Torres turns toward erasure, a politics of retreat. The novel’s title partly refers to his visual blackout poetry, where Gay’s interview transcripts of queer lives are largely blacked out in marker in an effort to obscure them from view, leaving behind an impression or afterthought of dignity. The overall tone of the novel is of mourning, protection, and healing from a traumatic alienation and fragmentation. It is a move to repair, as well as an acceptance of defeat (curiously, nowhere in the novel does Torres refute the pathologization of homosexuality as “variant”). It’s as if Torres wants to say to the world, you can have your history. Let’s leave identity out of it.
Of course it is a family separation in James that sets Jim’s saga in motion. Demon in Demon Copperhead is born to a single mother while she’s high. She marries an abusive man named Stoner, who puts her into rehab after a relapse and sends Demon into foster care. His friend Dori dropped out of school after her mother died to take care of her ailing father. Jan Gay in Blackouts was left by her father to a single mother, just as Nene was also left by his father. Juan was an orphan. Childless and worn down by the permalancer lifestyle, Anna and Tom in Perfection represent the declining birth rates in middle-class marriages throughout the West and East Asia, where children are a luxury symbol. Nearly all these novels are sending a blaring signal: we are seeing a breakdown of family structures across lower and middle-class societies.
The breakdown of the family signals an existential crisis for the novel’s place as a cultural form in American life. In The Rise of the Novel (1957), Ian Watt charted how changing family structures in 18th-century England, during a period of rapid market growth, were essential for the newly-born English novel to flourish. When the conjugal family (comprising parents and children) moved away from the patriarchal family (where parents, cousins, and children all lived in one house), reading habits changed. While their husbands were working, women isolated in their homes in new suburbs, without relatives to distract them, suddenly had long hours of solitary time, which they spent reading novels. The conjugal family, recast in the postwar United States as the nuclear family, remained largely uncontested in Western society for centuries, the bedrock of how wealth and capitalism operate in this country. Yet in the last 50 years — conjugal or chosen — it has been fraying, both as a statistic and as an ideal.
Only 2% of books published annually sell more than 5,000 copies. A 2022 survey by the NEA reported that 38% of American adults had read a novel or short story in the last year. Over the last decade, students enrolled in English and history majors have declined by a third. It has perhaps always been true that women have read more than men, but even this is declining — from 54% in 2012 to 47% in 2022 — alongside currents already set in motion from the rising costs of living, adding economic pressure for women to delay pregnancy and remain in the workforce. Women don’t have time to read. No one does.
This may signal a fall of solitary inwardness in American life, which means a deficit in dreaming. But it was in solitude that I first read Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers (2013), which presented such a glamorous, radical, and romanticized view of the New York art world that I decided to become an art critic just so I could be a part of it. Once I became a critic, I found that the art world was not at all as described in The Flamethrowers. The novel was a fantasy that, even though I didn’t attain it, forced me to create a life worth living in its pursuit. Similarly, the famous actress in Happiness and Love, visiting from Los Angeles, arrives at dinner to the “leftwing horseshoe-theory pseudo-artistic scene” in Dimes Square and learns, after being intellectually humiliated by the dinner guests, that her romanticization of downtown artists in New York who discuss “art and literature and politics” did not reflect at all who they are in reality. Yet it was the romance, now dispelled, that had given her a faith in art. She says, “I feel like a pilgrim who has walked for weeks only to find his holy site littered with trash and covered in graffiti.” Dubno arranges her little artistic scene as various simulacra of artists with no originals, but it is in the actress’ conjecture of an ideal, a trick of their phony spectacle, that she has learned she has ideals at all. Perhaps this is how anyone comes by their ideals. Democracy doesn’t exist, but we have to believe it does — “like a pilgrim” — or it definitely doesn’t exist. To her cynical guests, the actress vehemently shouts an ideal that sounds cringe but is in fact Kantian in notion: “High art reminds us of our humanity.” Again, this is also true of democracy.
The actress misreads the Dimes Square scene, and in turn she discovers the ideals that direct her life decisions as an artist. Here, Dubno is directly responding to postmodern theorists like Baudrillard and Debord, which is to say that Happiness and Love is, at its best, a novel of ideas. Woodcutters is devoid of ideas. But it is perhaps Dubno’s misreading of Woodcutters as a novel of ideas that led her to think she was copying one, when she in fact ended up writing something original. Here, I might call attention to the value of what I call the deliberate misreading. Perhaps it is not in some novel fantasy of the future but in copies of the misread past where originality happens, like accidental mutations in the cultural genetic code leading to the next cycle of evolution. This was true in Don Quixote as it was in Happiness and Love. In Blackouts, Torres deliberately misreads historical censorship — in pages that look like redacted FBI files — as a shadowy space of possibility, privacy, and human freedom. One blackout poem censors identifying or sexual details and reveals a kind of inward spiritual movement in the soul beyond identity: “I felt transported by prayer / a physiological state / a serene situation / when I was / desirous but not understanding.” It is in misreading the past that we chart out the future.
Geoffrey Mak is the author of the memoir Mean Boys. His novel Total Depravity is forthcoming this year.
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The deliberate misreading is the part I'll keep. I'm writing an Odyssey retelling set in Brazil, and the places that ended up mine aren't the ones where I departed on purpose. They're the ones where I couldn't copy Homer even while I was trying to. Burrow on Quixote being cornered into becoming his own person is much closer to the experience than "remake" is.