Wasserman's elegantly written book engages a central question: What do we make of the preoccupation with ephemera—things on the cusp of disappearance—in postwar American fiction, and what can that fiction tell us—indeed, teach us—about how we might live in our “dematerialized” digital era and ever more precarious world? Though The Death of Things is a contribution to recent work broadly characterized as new materialist, she critiques much of this scholarship for an “overcorrection against universalizing discourses of the subject” (13): decentering the human in favor of the material world, such approaches do not sufficiently illuminate ways that our encounters with things, including vanishing things, create new versions of subjectivity. To attend more robustly to our entanglements with things, Wasserman turns to the insights of psychoanalysis, especially Freud's little-known essay “On Transience,” which illuminates the “imbrication of subject and object” and offers psychic lessons in how to continue loving (in) the...
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