Gilmore’s provocative work attempts to unravel a common thread running through the American skein, one which he titles “legibility”: the desire for transparency and revelation and a continuing tension between revealing and subsuming the titular “depths” below the “surface”. He adeptly traces this through classic American literature (The Scarlet Letter, Moby Dick and Cooper’s Leatherstocking tales amongst others) and founding documents (The Declaration of Independence as illuminating the machinations of state and John Winthrop’s sermon on the Arbella as espousing the visible “city on a hill”) and places these alongside historical developments, i.e. the emergence of movies contemporaneously to the acceptance of psychoanalysis (technological surfaces vs. psychological depths) and the emergence of Landscape as “ocular mastery of the physical environment” (p. x) Gilmore’s approach hovers between a classic myth-and-symbol reading of American Culture and a more contextual cultural analysis. Indeed, Gilmore is quick to dismiss the former approach by relying on a less imagistic and more experiential model (his use of Freud is striking in this regard) thus negating some of Bruce Kucklic’s lauded criticisms of myth-and-symbol as a more visual mode of analysis that can often lead to conclusions which bear a tenuous relation at best to .

Overall, Gilmore’s argument is powerful and lucid, but a few criticisms remain. By resurrecting the idea of a shared American culture, Gilmore problematically relies on canonical works of American fiction to elucidate his claims. Although he acknowledges that this is his training as a literature professor, readers might wonder if the thread of “legibility” might run through more popular cultural forms also.

While still thought-provoking, the last chapter of Surface and Depth seems to peter out rather too abruptly. His corollary to the otherwise noble quest within American letters to render the machinations of society and government legible is that this legibility becomes both subliminally and physically occluded (“illegible”, or indeed “invisible”) when addressing the presence of African-Americans within American culture. Can a quest for legibility entail erasure and obfuscation? Gilmore provides some interesting readings of Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Frederick Douglass’ Narrative but falls into the myth-and-symbol trap by neglecting to provide sound historical evidence to bolster his assertions. Given the strength of contextual forays in his other chapters, this is a disappointing elision, as is the consideration of gender inequality as something rendered invisible also.

What is also lacking in Gilmore’s text is a solid definition of his central terms including “legibility”, “surface” and “depth”. Is Hester Prynne working to reveal “depths” or conceal them in The Scarlet Letter? How are these different and similar to the “depths” of Freud’s id and superego? Gilmore neglects to address these issues head-on and as such it is unclear if there are many different conceptions of “depth” throughout American culture or (less plausibly) whether the act of exploration is the common trope he is illuminating. Perhaps, though, Gilmore’s reticence to give a distinct answer to these questions confirms his point: the act of revelation and seeking as process and empirical exploration is just as important as the revelation itself. Surface and Depth thus emerges as a work whose intriguing thesis has much room for future exploration.