The Plutocratic Imagination

If we still take the novel as a register of politics and culture, it is not a good time for social democracy. Since around 1990, a new wave of American fiction has emerged that focuses on the dominance of finance, the political power of the super-rich, and the decline of the middle class. This new wave marks a turn in the political novel: the fiction of the 1970s and 1980s tended to expose conspiracies under the surface of formal government, whereas this new wave tends to see government as subsidiary, with the main societal choices occurring within the economic sphere. The novels animate the turn to neoliberalism, and thus we might aptly categorize them as “the neoliberal novel.”

This turn is evident in perhaps the most prominent novel of the past decade, Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom. Freedom depicts the dramas of a professional, middle-class, middle-American family around the turn of the new century. But rather than the novel’s just being a family drama, its plot explicitly hinges on politics. The protagonist, Walter Berglund, a lawyer, is a lifelong environmentalist who has declaimed population growth since his college years. (The other main characters are Walter’s wife, Patty; his best friend from college—and eventually Patty’s lover—Richard; and Walter and Patty’s son, Joey.) During the main action of the novel, Walter moves from his job working for the Nature Conservancy in Minnesota to work for a nonprofit foundation inside the beltway in Washington, D.C., the Cerulean Mountain Trust. The trust is funded by a super-rich benefactor named Vin Haven, who has made his money (nine digits, the book coyly notes) in energy but now has taken a special interest in protecting songbirds such as the cerulean warbler. The rub is that Vin will strip-mine the land before he donates it.