Visions of the economy

Looking for an imaginative approach to our economic catastrophe - with concealed crimes, obscure motives and unreliable narrators?

You would, it seems,  be better off even with this weekend's political wrangling than with any of the latest literary fiction on the subject.

We are still waiting for a great novel - or even a very good novel - of the financial crash. But attempts have still been piling up in the offices of the TLS and our critic, David Horspool, has been searching for decent nuggets like a voter seeking a believable promise in the budget debates or creditor sifting through the relics of the Madoff empire.

Take Henry Sutton’s Get Me Out of Here. It shows a familiar descent from self- deception into orgies of sexual violence and self-destruction, but is too heavily reliant, Horspool says, on the high-end consumerism that Bret Easton Ellis employed two recessions ago in American Psycho - and without any of its antecedent’s dispassionate amorality.

In Talitha Stevenson’s Disappear, we are with Charlie and Leila, a gilded couple, he a hedge fund manager, she a doer-up of flats in the seemingly endless property boom. Trouble strikes and Charlie’s father offers to give him his inheritance early. “His face was elated, strangely radiant now. Charlie’s body felt cold, his head felt hot. He pictured putting the keys into the ignition of his car – but then he remembered he didn’t have one". Perhaps one for would-be Tory Chancellor, George Osborne, to flick through over Easter,.

 Paul Torday's The Hopeless Life of Charlie Summers includes a man  whose family crest shows a cat licking its paws, along with the no-nonsense motto “Semper plus”, a charming bully who will do business with anyone and inevitably, rather too inevitably,  it is not he who suffers when his fund runs out of money. Charlie Summers' own business ventures, Japanese dog food and Dutch wine, do not spare him a tragic end. Take your pick of recipients for this effort.

 Like Torday’s narrator, Alex Preston’s hero  Charlie Wales works for a hedge fund during the collapse of the bond market, and the wiping out of funds totalling millions. Charlie Wales? Remember the name? No, you haven't read This Bleeding City in your sleep, you are merely recalling F. Scott Fitzgerald’s story about the aftermath of an earlier economic crash, Babylon Revisited (1940). 

To different degrees, says Horspool, all these new novels reflect a theme of Fitzgerald’s story about a man returning to the scene of his excesses and his downfall, the idea that market corrections are not only financial episodes, they are also moral ones. But only one of them takes the risk of identifying so closely with the master of the crash craft. 

The search for truth goes on. 

Comments

[Shelley]

That's the first time I have heard the phrase "the despair of materialism," and it coincides with having just read Tony Judt's article (written against heartbreaking personal odds) in the current New York Review of Books.

It's my hope that not only writing about this collapse, but writing about the previous one--the big one--may be useful.