ABSTRACT
This article opens by exploring the evocations in Jonathan Coe’s novel, Number 11, of contemporary forms of social, economic and political precariousness. It then addresses the ubiquity of risk in everyday life in Ian McEwan’s Saturday, a narrative that thematises exposure and plays on its ambivalence as both a conduciveness to danger, but also an openness to a dependence on the other. Patrick Neate’s Jerusalem is then considered in the light of a principle of interdependence made possible through the trope of inter-generational trauma, and by the staging of relations of care through which exposure to risk allows for the emergence of solidarity. Finally, I turn to Jon McGregor’s Even the Dogs to tease out the ways in which the evocation of precariousness and exclusion performed through specific narrative choices promotes the reader’s attentiveness to new visibilities, thereby fostering the ethical and political dimensions of the novel.
