The Natural Laws of Plot is a subtle and sophisticated synthesis of work in narrative and novel theory, and formalist criticism more broadly, with an equally rigorous incorporation of eighteenth-century science studies. What may be most remarkable is what the book does not say, the way it achieves its level of reading by tactically restricting its attention and calmly delimiting its relevant materials. For although this is a book of rare expansiveness and literary-historical range, traversing a vast tract of eighteenth-century culture (with a coda on Zadie Smith's White Teeth), its focus is quite concentrated, and the generative tension between these two aspects of the project should be of interest to literary critics.
Delimitation may be understood first in terms of the book's self-assigned ambit. The “natural laws” of its title are those articulated by eighteenth-century natural philosophy across areas of inquiry later codified into specialized disciplines, from matter...
