MONEY PLOTS
From the archive
I’ve been working on an essay for a newspaper occasioned by the closure of Bookforum last month. Below is the first piece I wrote for the magazine, a cover essay on money in fiction from the Summer 2012 issue. It’s always been available in their archive, if behind a paywall, but sometimes things disappear unexpectedly.
FICTITIOUS VALUES
Boom and bust in twenty-first-century lit
IN THE FALL OF 2013 OR 2014, if not before, we’ll probably be reading a novel about Occupy Wall Street. What would such a book look like, and what would it tell us about money? You can bet the narrator will be omniscient and the telling panoramic. If half the action takes place in and around Zuccotti Park—where the hardened core of the cast squats, drumming, deliberating, echoing announcements—the rest will be scattered about the newsrooms, boardrooms, barrooms, and bedrooms of Manhattan, with excursions to Williamsburg or Long Island City or Hoboken, maybe even Staten Island, convenient by ferry, and surely suburbs to the north such as Greenwich, cradle of the 1 percent. But beyond journalistic attention to the protests’ throbbing center and the fissures extending up the avenues, how to dramatize it all?
A class-clashing love triangle would do it. A twenty-eight-year-old woman drifts down to the park. She’s radicalized in mind—what’s just about a system that’s saddled a hardworking designer like her with constant revolving credit-card debt and a mountain of student loans?—and in heart by an anarchist she meets at a people’s assembly. The trouble is she’s just started dating a dreamy hedge-fund manager, the sort of finance professional who keeps in touch with his roots by moonlighting on the weekends as a cabdriver with his grandfather’s medallion. (Did I mention his grandfather survived the Holocaust?) Over pillow talk, as he faults her new affinity group for insufficiently appreciating the dynamic possibilities of the meritocracy, she realizes just how complicit he is in the system of not just national but global inequality. She zips out of bed and down to the occupation. Her jilted swain shows up to work to find his fortunes reversed: His fund is shedding him. The occupation continues, as does her affair with the earthy anarchist. When the cops arrive to cleanse the protest, she finds him bleeding and possibly concussed. She drags him west in search of a cab. Guess who’s driving.
Most social novels aren’t quite so crude, but broad strokes and rigged coincidences tend to be a necessary evil—or, in a better-case scenario for readers, a comic boon. Tougher for the novelist are the tasks of rendering convincing characters across the class spectrum and capturing economic intricacies in a way that’s both cogent and readable. I’ve not heard of any institutions that offer joint MFA-MBA degrees.
The impulse to become a writer suggests a fundamental fiscal incompetence. Fiction writers, often deriving their income from their status as writers (by teaching) rather than from their actual writing, tend to carve out lives somewhere within the middle class but find themselves at a remove from the higher and lower echelons of economic activity. The campus—a zone that encourages all participants to make a pretense of classlessness—has become the default home of most novelists, and this may partly explain why class is an easier subject to avoid now than in the days of Wharton, Fitzgerald, or Ellison. The love triangle in Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot tilts not according to a geometry of class but according to the characters’ reading tastes. In any case, authors’ actual relationships to money don’t make for thrilling plot twists. Nobody wants to read a novel that climaxes with a successful book deal. There might, however, be a decent conceptual fiction to be written under the title A History of My Student Loans.