What do we mean when we call a novel “urgent?” Presumably, we do not mean that the novel urges us to commit a certain act, or even to align with an ideology or support a particular cause. Even the most overtly political fiction that I’ve enjoyed — say, Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed — never caused me to join an anarcho-syndicalist organization or start my own commune. I take it I’m not alone in this. In my experience reading “urgent” novels, I would estimate that the term indicates less the verb “to urge,” but rather “urgency” as an emotional condition, generally with an implied political valence. I would hazard that this is a modern update on the famous Aristotelian formula that tragedy is pity plus fear. (If I got that wrong, you can blame the notes I took in ninth-grade English.)