Christian Lorentzen examines how fiction will address our fiscal moment:
If money is a matter of possible futures, the book with the most to tell us about the present moment is one in which money hardly figures at all: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005), a novel that dispenses with a realist depiction of society as a theater of individual striving and instead shows that we live in a world where character, creativity, and love cannot save us. In this respect, Never Let Me Go, as Nancy Fraser has recently suggested in New Left Review, suggests a literature for the 99 percent. It follows three young people from a dreamy adolescence in what seems to be a privileged boarding school into a truncated adulthood that expires as they donate their organs to the barely glimpsed society that has created them—these children are clones—to exploit them. Their only assets are their very bodies, over which they have no control. It doesn’t take much of a leap to see in Ishiguro’s scenario the lifetimes of debt paying and service employment that await dreamy children at a time when college tuition swells at twice the rate of inflation.
The Dish 