Malaise novels offer an experience in lieu of ideas or an about

Evidence

Malaise—at professional precarity as in Temporary, or romantic torpor as in A Separation, or climate crisis as in The New Wilderness, or all of the above as in Edie Richter Is Not Alone—all equally occasions for elastic emanation. … And if we cannot say that ideas were had or that it was about anything, of reading them there is still a surety: at least it is an experience. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 183