Contemporary Literary Novels Are Haunted by the Absence of Money

From The Literary Hub:

One of the pleasures of reading 19th-century novels is that authors write openly about money. Take for instance Mr. Bennett, the patriarch in Pride and Prejudice, whose £2,000 a year makes him amongst the wealthier members of the gentry. With that sum, he can comfortably maintain a large household, with a full complement of servants and carriages. On the other hand, he is no Mr. Darcy, who with his £10,000 a year has an immense manor house and accompanying grounds.

This attention paid to money accelerated as Romanticism gave way in the mid 19th century to Realism. In Balzac’s Lost Illusions, a man from the provinces sees exactly how the machinery of the arts world works to create celebrated authors. As late as 1891, we have a protagonist in George Gissing’s New Grub Street plotting how he’ll use his small inheritance to secure literary stardom.

But after World War I, writers started to use a kind of code. Look at, say, The Sun Also Rises. We know that Brett Ashley, Jake Barnes, and Robert Cohn all travel in the same social circles, but we’ve much less idea of their relative means. In an aside within Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the French economist Thomas Piketty theorized that the high inflation of the post-war period is what led writers to stop using dollar amounts in their fiction—but I would say this increasing vagueness is about more than amounts, it’s also about our understanding of what’s at stake for characters and of what their futures hold. Money forms a backdrop to The Sun Also Rises, but it’s pretty light on the specifics of how much of it each character has.

Jake presumably has no money, as he must work as a journalist (a low-class occupation), but he knows Cohn from Princeton. Lady Brett Ashley alludes to having married money, but in a 19th-century novel we would understand her precise financial situation, while in The Sun Also Rises these form no part of the plot. We understand that these people belong to some sort of demimonde, where the classes mix, but we’re given much less information about their money woes and worries than we would’ve had even thirty years earlier.

This vagueness becomes an endemic part of Anglophone letters after WWII, as novels develop an intensely interior quality that divorces them from the world of money and manners. Take the work of Donna Tartt. Her scholarship boy in The Secret History is debauched through his association with the upper-class kids at pseudo-Bennington, but none of the characters are particularly legible in terms of their income. Their falling-out with Bunny, who has social class but not status, is particularly perplexing: if they’re truly upper-class and moneyed, they ought to be alert to the existence of poor cousins. Their sensitivity to being sponged off seems a bit declasse and at odds with the way they’re portrayed. These kids are rich New Englanders, but they have a kind of status anxiety—a fear of being poor and being seen as poor—that’s at odds with the rest of their old-money portrayal.

. . . .

The Secret History at least attempts to discuss money. Most modern novels elide the subject entirely, even when it’s seemingly quite relevant. Take Ben Lerner’s Leaving Atocha Station. He’s in Spain on a Fulbright, but I know, from my friends who’ve done Fulbrights, that the stipend isn’t particularly generous: between about $2,000 and $3,000 a month, give or take. If you’re a student in Madrid on a Fulbright and you have other money coming in and you don’t have outstanding student loans, your life is very different than if you’re relying on that stipend to make ends meet. But in the case of Lerner’s protagonist, we simply don’t know, even though the novel is intensely concerned with whether or not the protagonist should pursue some kind of future in the arts (a decision that surely has money implications).

The same is true for Adelle Waldman’s The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. We know that he lives alone, and that studio apartments in Brooklyn cost, what, $2,000 a month in 2013? Somewhere in that ballpark. He got a big book advance, and he’s dating a newspaper reporter in her thirties. When I was in my thirties, dating women with real jobs, living off a big book advance, the constant subtext was, “Will this last? Will you be able to support a family?” But in Nathaniel P it’s not a major conflict.

A similar issue dogs Detransition, Baby, whose intricate comedy of manners is marred by the complete economic illegibility of one of its main characters: Ames works an upper-middle-class office job, but we’ve no idea if he has debt and can’t guess his salary to within even an order of magnitude. When he and his pregnant boss, Katrina, consider entering into a co-parenting relationship with his ex-girlfriend, Reese, the obvious question never comes up: since she earns the least amount of money and isn’t particularly career-oriented, will Reese stay home with the child? If so, how we will she be compensated? If she isn’t going to take care of the child, then what will their childcare situation be, and how can they afford childcare while maintaining three separate child-ready households in New York City?

What is the reason for this increasing vagueness? One possibility is that modern people simply aren’t as legible, in financial terms, as people in the past. In Jane Austen’s day, the size of a man’s income was a source of open discussion—this is no longer the case.

It could certainly be the case that in modern America we simply do not notice how much money a person has, or how much they’re likely to come into. But this flies in the face of my own and, I think, most people’s experience of daily life. Because the truth is that while we don’t openly discuss how much money people have, we certainly spend a lot of time thinking about it.

For instance, a friend once told me the easiest way to know if a college-educated person has rich parents is to ask if they have student loans. Does the MC in Leaving Atocha Station have student loans? Does Bunny in The Secret History have student loans? Which characters in Nathaniel P have student loans? This is a simple and extremely legible financial marker that one would expect to appear routinely in novels, but it doesn’t.

Link to the rest at The Literary Hub