Patrick Hayes argues that the significance of Coetzee’s fiction lies in the acuity with which it both explores and develops the tradition of the novel - ranging from Cervantes, Defoe and Richardson, to Dostoevsky, Kafka and Beckett - as part of a sustained attempt to rethink the relationship between writing and politics. For Coetzee questions about the future of the novel are closely related to what it means to write after Beckett, and J.M. Coetzee and the Novel pays special attention to the ways in which his fiction discerningly assimilates different aspects of literary modernism to address the questions most fundamental to the experience of late twentieth-century politics.