Taste:
The Money Vanishes
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Novelists used to care about capital and commerce; not anymore
By Daniel Akst
10/09/98
The Wall Street Journal

"Culture follows money," said F. Scott Fitzgerald, himself suitably concerned with greenbacks, and never has the observation been truer. With capitalism triumphant almost everywhere, money and business have come to pervade discussions of culture. Even small-town newspapers, otherwise blind to the ebb and flow of books, movies and music, publish bestseller lists and Hollywood box-office results. More Americans than ever go forth daily into the world of business, and through the magic of mutual funds, record numbers have become stock-market investors.

Which makes it all the more puzzling that, with a few rare exceptions, serious literary fiction nowadays ignores the whole world of money, work and business. "Novelists are missing out on a very obvious thing here," says Jay Parini, a novelist and critic who is moved to sarcasm by the blindness of his fellow scribes on this subject. "It really takes some doing for the most imaginative people around, year after year, to avoid writing about one of the two main preoccupations of the culture, the other one being sex."

Literature's squeamish abandonment of the grubby world of commerce is a relatively recent phenomenon. In the old days, after all, novels -- like novelists -- were consumed with getting, keeping, marrying, inheriting and otherwise living with (and without) dough. Balzac took pains to tell us what every little thing cost and used money to calibrate his characters' social position down to the last sou. Money was at the center of Thackeray's "Vanity Fair" and animated much of Dickens's work. Dostoevski had characters killing for it, Gogol made a comic novel of its fraudulent pursuit and Trollope rarely lost sight of it -- think only of the crooked financier at the center of "The Way We Live Now" or the dozens of other schemers in his novels.

"Without its unembarrassed interest in money, the nineteenth-century novel . . . would have been gravely impoverished, not to say a good deal shorter," writes Kevin Jackson in the introduction to his "Oxford Book of Money" (1995), adding that W. H. Auden "wittily records his shock at seeing Jane Austen's fiction `Reveal so frankly and with such sobriety/The economic basis of society.'"

In those days (and perhaps still to a greater extent than people like to acknowledge), money and matrimony were closely entwined, and probably nobody explored this nexus more effectively than Austen, whose heroines and their suitors were quite well aware how much income their prospective spouses enjoyed. A hundred years later, in the Edwardian period, class-challenging prosperity absorbed novelists like John Galsworthy ("A Man of Property"), Arnold Bennett ("The Old Wives' Tale") and H.G. Wells ("Kipps," "Tono-Bungay").

Money used to be big in American literature too. Credit cards, for instance, were foreseen in Edward Bellamy's 1888 Utopian classic "Looking Backward," although his crystal ball was otherwise seriously in need of Windex: Bellamy's futurist paradise (in the year 2000, yet) involved a sort of state capitalism in which private transactions were barred and industrial giants had evolved into a single "Great Trust" that provided for everyone's needs. Around the same time, William Dean Howells was taking up the hazard of new fortunes in an ever more prosperous America.

Later writers weren't as sanguine about big business. Upton Sinclair and Frank Norris, to name just two, savaged it in works with unashamed titles like "The Jungle," "The Octopus " and "The Pit." Sinclair Lewis's "Babbitt" -- about a boosterish real-estate broker who wrestles with conformity in his Midwestern community of Zenith -- became so famous that his name has entered the lexicon, like Catch-22. American novels, like American society, were more class-conscious in those days.

Things have changed since then. True, Philip Roth won the Pulitzer Prize for "American Pastoral," which does for the glove business what "Moby Dick" did for whaling, and William Gaddis and Tom Wolfe have taken on money and business, but these are exceptions. Aside from the more commercial novelists, like John Grisham, not many writers in recent years have experienced what Richard Powers (whose recent novel, "Gain," deals with a soap company) calls "this sudden discovery of the rhinoceros at the table."

Mr. Powers said that after five books it dawned that this rhinoceros -- the gigantic forces of commerce that shape our culture -- needed desperately to be tackled in a novel. "It seemed to me not only odd but appalling that it has been so absent from contemporary fiction," he said in an interview. "The fiction of alienation, of lives adrift and disoriented, only makes sense if you restore it to the context of these forces."

Why this strange silence on money and business? One reason might be that since World War II, prosperity and the social safety net have brought most readers a degree of security missing from the lives of earlier generations. Another is that, in the long-ago age when novels were most obsessed with money, it was awfully hard to make any, or it was only beginning to be possible. Money was something you married into or inherited or stole, and these subjects provided much of the drama in Austen, Dickens and others. Compared to the U.S. economy on the brink of the millennium -- when people get jobs, forge careers and lease sport utility vehicles -- the world of money in those days was far more Calvinistic: either you had it or you didn't, and there was little you could do to effect your own redemption.

Or maybe it's just that, thanks to the colleges and universities that have taken them in, most publishing novelists these days aren't hungry enough or familiar enough with getting a living in the commercial world. No sensible person will suggest that starvation is essential to art, but the extent to which the academy has subsumed the literary culture has been "disastrous," in the view of Mr. Parini, who is himself a professor of English at Middlebury College. "The academy has sheltered fiction writers from the world," he said, adding that, "As a result they became very solipsistic."

The romanticized image of the modern writer hasn't helped either. That solitary figure alienated from society, forging his art in the crucible of his soul to produce a multilingual tome the average person cannot hope to understand, isn't the sort of person to write a fictional expose of the meat business. Mr. Powers notes that, "with the apotheosis of business in other spheres of life," its absence from the domain of literature is in a way understandable, although still not excusable. If love and work are the things that give our lives value, after all, it's strange that the literature of the day should only cover half the list.

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Mr. Akst is a novelist and financial journalist.