In this short and contentious book, Brooks exalts what he calls “narrative takeover,” the ways in which, owing to the power of the modern novel, we have been given one and only one means of understanding the world and ourselves: narration. A large claim, it is asserted with considerable force: Narrative seems to have become accepted as the only form of knowledge and speech that regulates human affairs.
He also states that the “plethoric” spread of narrative has come to control the writing of history itself: “History, which some decades back seemed to have set aside storytelling in favor of demographic and social analyses of selected moments and places, appears to have returned to full-throated storytelling.” Although Brooks occasionally moderates the force of such claims (“Do we really want all our understandings to be expressed in narrative terms?”), and although he would not deny that many human affairs are regulated...
