Only when people are afraid do certain types of novels get written. The quieter kind, where the source of fear is a mortgage statement or a pension that has subtly vanished, is not thriller- or horror-themed. It turns out that one of the most fertile topics for fiction is economic fear, and authors have been exploiting it long before the term “financial crisis” was used in a sentence devoid of irony.
In it, John Steinbeck established his reputation. Fundamentally, The Grapes of Wrath was a road novel about dispossession, about a family losing everything they had ever owned while the market’s machinery continued on, unconcerned. Steinbeck’s brilliance was capturing the weight of an empty truck bed, the dust in your throat, and the particular humiliation of living in poverty in a nation that views poverty as a personal failure. He got the material from the Great Depression. It was permanently shaped by literature. Decades later, Martin Amis looked at the bloated optimism of 1980s London and produced Money — a book so dense with excess and vertigo that reading it feels faintly like a hangover. Every sentence contains economic anxiety, but it’s filtered through a kind of hallucinogenic black comedy that realism couldn’t have produced on its own.
The intriguing thing about recession fiction as a genre is that it rarely accurately depicts what it’s like to experience a financial collapse. A cast of Londoners, including a family from a corner store, a Premier League football player, and a banker waiting for his end-of-year bonus, were set against the slow-moving disaster of 2008 in John Lanchester’s 2012 novel Capital, which made a serious attempt at the ensemble approach. The book opens in late 2007, when things still looked, on the surface, like they were going up. Lanchester describes the street he writes about as a “place of winners.” For roughly fifteen pages, the phrase appears to be sincere before turning into one of the novel’s more scathing jokes. By the time Bear Stearns collapses in the middle of the book, the reader has witnessed enough small human choices add up to comprehend precisely how systemic failure permeates individual lives—through contracts, through YouTube soccer videos, or through the epiphany that a market that appeared to be a friend was never truly paying attention to you at all.
Perhaps more than anything else, Lanchester captures interconnectedness. The way the misfortune of one character spreads to another, and then to still another, in ways that no one intended or especially desired. That web of dependencies is one of capitalism’s least discussed features — its ability to distribute grief as efficiently as it distributes wealth. Fiction can undoubtedly change people’s perceptions of economics, but it’s still unclear if it can help them comprehend it better than a newspaper.
One of the more unusual and exquisite works in this genre was created during Iceland’s economic collapse in 2008. Written in Icelandic in 2011 and subsequently translated into English, Oddě Eir’s Land of Love and Ruins tackles the crisis through a narrator attempting to reconcile the old country—its sagas, feast days, and multilayered sense of collective memory—with a present that kept rewriting itself in ways the past couldn’t explain. The book’s unique texture comes from the conflict between tradition and an unexpectedly unstable modern world. There’s a subplot about family land being sold to a foreign developer that reads, in context, as something closer to mourning than to political commentary. Eir is writing about what happens when the ground you thought was permanent turns out to be a transaction rather than the financial crisis.
It appears that experimental fiction is more adept at handling that aspect of the earth shifting beneath the feet than any other mode. At one point in Mauro Javier Cardenas’s novel about three Ecuadorian men witnessing their political idealism crumble under decades of economic mismanagement, a long list of demands for privatization is presented in quick, almost comical succession. Make the phone lines private. Electricity should be privatized. Privatize water. “Then what?” is the straightforward final question. Deadpan satire can have a devastating effect, making it both funnier and sadder than it should be.
It’s difficult to ignore the fact that the majority of authors who have produced this work most famously have tended to favor the experimental over the traditional. That might not be a coincidence. Instead of neat narrative arcs, recession and austerity create something more akin to collage, a sequence of reversals and interruptions that accumulate rather than resolve. People’s perceptions of time and sequence are strangely altered by the stress of long-term financial uncertainty. Fiction that takes inspiration from that formal instability, which feels fractured, non-linear, and sometimes perplexing, may just be expressing the reality of what it’s like to live inside a dysfunctional economic system.
The economy has been a source of dread, quiet and persistent, for a long time now. Authors are always coming up with new ways to confront that fear, to take control of it, and to make it something that readers can relate to. Whether that’s comfort or confrontation is probably a matter of the specific book and the specific reader. What seems certain is that as long as people are worried about money — which is to say, always — the recession novel is not going anywhere.
