Novels of Democratic Exhaustion.

This article examines a shift in twentieth- and twenty-first-century U.S. fiction regarding the nation's democratic ideals. While earlier novels often portrayed collective efforts to redeem American democracy as ongoing and hopeful, recent works such as Ling Ma's *Severance* (2018), Brit Bennett's *The Vanishing Half* (2020), Asali Solomon's *The Days of Afrekete* (2021), and Vanessa Veselka's *Zazen* (2011) depict democracy as irreparably broken, with protagonists focused on individual survival rather than collective political renewal. These contemporary narratives reflect a pervasive democratic crisis, portraying collective action as ineffective or oppressive and suggesting that imagining futures beyond traditional U.S. democracy may be necessary. Although these novels convey a sense of defeat, they also intensify the desire for a different future by highlighting the gap between current realities and democratic ideals.