‘Anti‐illusionism is, I suspect, only a marking of time, a phase of recuperation, in the history of the novel. The question is, what next?’ (J. M. Coetzee). Placing Coetzee in relation to the long tradition of the novel, from Beckett, Kafka, and Dostoevsky to Richardson, Defoe, and Cervantes, this book argues that Coetzee's significance lies in the acuity with which he has explored the resources of that tradition 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 this book describes and evaluates the ways in which his fiction draws upon aspects of modernist writing to address the major questions posed by late twentieth‐century politics. The unsettling comic energy of Beckett's prose, especially its insistent complication of tone and register, was, as Coetzee put it, nothing less than ‘a secret…that I wanted to make my own’, and Patrick Hayes brings to the fore the little‐discussed comedic dimension of Coetzee's writing. Opening up a range of new approaches to this major contemporary author, J. M. Coetzee and the Novel argues that it is only by paying especially close attention to the experience of reading Coetzee's complex and nuanced fiction that its important impact on longstanding questions about identity, community, and the nature of political modernity can be appreciated.