Rushdy's book tells us a great deal not just about the four novels he reads closely, but also about the American conceptions of slavery and race in the second half of the Twentieth century; we walk away from Neo Slave Narratives with a multilayered sense of what Rushdy calls the social logic of the form, a logic which demonstrates that form is not extrinsic to historical understanding but rather constitutive of it. In short, Rushdy approaches his texts as complex objects circulating in many intersecting exchanges and listens carefully for the whistling and humming around him.