The Credit Crisis and the Novel

After the fall of 2008, when the American economy revealed itself to have been a particularly elaborate house of cards, after the astonishment and the rage and the losses still to be reckoned, those of us who hadn't lost too much—or whose unemployment at least offered time for reading in libraries not yet closed by state budget cuts—could search for novels about the very financial elites whose bubbleblowing actions proved so destructive to everyone but themselves. Who were these barbarians, no longer at the gate, but entrenched firmly in our midst? In what ways were these architects of our doom people just like us, but with more money; in what ways were they very different? Is there anything to be learned from such retrospective explorations of the inner lives of America's latest aristocracy? For the 99 percent of us who live on the wrong side of America's ever-widening income divide, inquiries into the moral and emotional lives of the I-bankers seem almost the height of poor taste, a bad joke on par with the taxpayer-funded bailout of banks that remain in private hands. A conscientious novelist invariably humanizes the characters created, yet it seems a perversion of justice for readers to extend, interest free, the credit of our compassion to the types of people who spend so much of their own emotional capital reducing the rest of us to the collateral of their speculative fantasies.