Lamenting the perceived tendency of media theorists to lapse into “speculations about the [digital] future, rather than a record or theory of the present”, Lev Manovich once imagined a historian asking, years from now: “Where were the theoreticians at the moment when the icons and buttons of multimedia interfaces were like wet paint on a just-completed painting, before they became universal conventions and thus slipped into invisibility?” (The Language of New Media, p.7) In The Digital Banal: New Media and American Literature and Culture, Zara Dinnen applies Manovich’s question to fiction and popular culture. If writers fail to apprehend “the stretched-out now” of already-invisible digital life, Dinnen turns this failure into a broader commentary on a contemporary condition: the digital banal, an affective “obfuscation” of “what is newly happening” (pp. 24, 31). This nuanced study returns to the scene of Manovich’s wet paint, agitating the smooth surface of contemporary culture to find, beneath, new material conditions and structures of feeling: “data centers, cell towers, undersea cables and rare-mineral mining” as well as new interactions between “human, animal and environmental bodies” that are often sidelined (p. 39). By considering recent U.S. novels and films (by authors including Jonathan Lethem, David Fincher, Sheila Heti and Colson Whitehead) as interfaces between technologies, cultures and agents, Dinnen opens up new readings of texts that deflect the particular strangeness of “becoming-with technology” onto banal, familiar narratives (p. 16). That is to say, Dinnen’s interest is primarily in excavating textual mechanisms of elision, rather than in recovering the occluded materials, decisions, bodies and accidents that produce our particular digital cultures, cultures that could have been – could be – otherwise. This operational focus is the source of her book’s considerable theoretical force, but also the source of its main limitation: a niggling vagueness, from time to time, around the distinct kinds of digital subjecthood authors can inhabit.