March 7, 2012
Why don’t serious novelists write about finance?
by Kelly Burdick
Writing in the Financial Times, John Lanchester—the author of the novel Capital—asks why it is that so few novelists and poets tackle banking and finance:
You can assemble an entire canon of the greatest English language poets from men who had lengthy professional careers in the world of money and administration, from Geoffrey Chaucer (customs) to Edmund Spenser (government and administration) to John Milton (ditto) all the way through to TS Eliot (banking and publishing) and Wallace Stevens – and this entire pantheon barely touches on the world of work and money. If it seems unreasonable to expect poets to write about practical matters, well, it can be done: bear in mind that Virgil’s Georgics had the explicit ambition of being a guide to farming, as well as an account of the pastoral year [....]
It’s especially apparent in literary fiction, which often seems to have a positive aversion to the depiction of work in general, and financial work in particular. This isn’t true of genre fiction, where there have been a series of bold attempts at dramatising the world of money, from Arthur Hailey’s 1975 novel “The Moneychangers” through the thrillers of Paul Erdman to Robert Harris’s recent “The Fear Index.”
Lanchester’s thoughts are worth reading in full. He blames Henry James (for having “a sense of what was and was not appropriate as the domain of Art”), the quick evolution of financial markets (“a novel about this year’s trends in finance, by the time it comes out in two years, would risk being irretrievably outdated”), and the staggering complexity of financial instruments (“everything has to be simplified to the point of caricature”).
Kelly Burdick is the executive editor of Melville House.
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10 Comments
What about Tom Wolfe? Both The Bonfire of the Vanities and A Man in Full are richly entertaining on the subject of high finance (and high financiers) and engage with the nuts and bolts.
“Everyone’s had an interesting life,” she says. “Unless they’re interested in business or something.” — Leonora Carrington interviewed by the Independent.
Having said that, Anthony Trollope. It’s all about money and The Way We Live Now particularly so.
“The Way We Live Now is a satirical novel published in London in 1875 by Anthony Trollope, after a popular serialisation. In 1872 Trollope returned to England from abroad and was appalled by the greed which was loose in the land. His scolding rebuke was his longest novel.Containing over a hundred chapters, The Way We Live Now is particularly rich in sub-plot. It was inspired by the financial scandals of the early 1870s, and lashes out at the pervading dishonesty of the age, commercial, political, moral, and intellectual.” // wikipedia
Lanchester says in the full FT piece that the trend gets going post-Trollope:
“practical
engagement with the world of finance is absent from non-genre fiction,
and has been since the 19th century, when writers such as Balzac,
Dickens and Trollope were just as interested in the world of money as
they were in everything else.”
Yes, and I can think of two more very recent examples: Justin Cartwright’s “Other People’s Money” and Adam Haslett’s “Union Atlantic”
Maybe novelists shy away from the topic because William Gaddis said all there is to say about it in J R.
The Way We Live Now is without question Trollope’s worst mature novel. Why someone who wrote dozens of elegantly sculpted books is most often mentioned today in connection with something so formally bloated and straightforwardly anti-Semitic is beyond me.
The Way We Live Now is an excellent argument against writing novels “about” finance. Tom Wolfe’s fiction, on the other hand, is an excellent argument against reading.
So this guy titled his book CAPITAL?
Cesar Birotteau,by Balzac: a great novel that isn’t often recognized as such, probably *because* it’s about capital.
Perhaps novelists agree with Carlyle that economics is “the dismal science.” Much easier to get interested in sex, war, family, history, bull-fighting, revolution, airplanes, jungles, et al.