Chronic Crisis Novels and the Quest for “the Good-Enough Life”: Kathrin Röggla’s die alarmbereiten, Kristine Bilkau’s Die Glücklichen, and Thorsten Nagelschmidt’s Arbeit

Abstract:This article discusses the literary engagement with chronic crises as the prevailing condition of the early twenty-first century. Chronic crisis narration dislodges the narrative modes and epistemological frames of modern crisis scenarios: crisis no longer designates the experience of a decisive tipping point after a climactic build-up but rather an enduring state of extremity, requiring uninterrupted resilience. The chronic crisis novel experiments with anthropologically inflected modes of narration to articulate the subjective and social experience of precarity, exhaustion, and the depletion of resources. However, by aesthetically reclaiming precariousness as the domain of relationality and pleasure, this genre also explores the idea of the “good-enough life” as a viable alternative to the middle-class expectation of the good life.