Thomas Piketty’s Capital famously uses the 19th century bourgeois novel – Austen and Balzac especially – to give a sense of what life was like in that previous age of inequality. Stephen Marche finds that he could have done the same for our own day, noting that the processes the economist describes “have already been reflected in American fiction with almost ridiculous specificity.” One example? The novels of Jonathan Franzen:
Future economic historians won’t have to look very far to find fictional descriptions of our
current financial realities. The social realist novel of the moment can be identified by the preeminent, almost exclusive, emphasis it places on social expressions of the changing economic reality. Currently, the large-scale realism of Jonathan Franzen, articulated in his famous article for Harper’s in 1996 and achieved most fully in The Corrections and Freedom, stands utterly triumphant. The narrative forms that thrived in the mid-nineties — minimalism, with its descriptions of poor and rural men; magical realism which incorporated non-Western elements into the traditional English novel; the exotic lyricism of John Berger or Michael Ondaatje — have been pushed to the side.
The principal subject of mainstream literary fiction today is the way we live now, meaning the way the upper middle class lives now. The characters’ lives are aimed, with single-minded purpose, toward the achievement of comfortable and socially acceptable financial security, which is threatening always to collapse or is in the process of collapsing. If Raymond Carver was the master of the death of the American dream, Franzen is the chronicler of its ghostly persistence — the combination of economic growth with deepening insecurity. His characters run on the currents of two polarizing forces — a sense of entitlement and a sense that those entitlements might soon be taken away. “The problem was money and the indignities of life without it,” Franzen writes in The Corrections. “Every stroller, cell phone, Yankees cap, and SUV he saw was a torment. He wasn’t covetous; he wasn’t envious. But without money he was hardly a man.”
Scott Esposito isn’t as impressed with Piketty’s literary chops:
To be sure, Piketty does invoke Balzac and Austen, as Marche says, but not nearly enough to warrant the claim that “Capital in the Twenty-First Century is perhaps the only major work of economics that could reasonably be mistaken for a work of literary criticism.” If only. Piketty mainly invokes Austen to help support his observations that monetary inflation didn’t exist in the 19th century. Balzac gets a little more play, as Piketty uses him to demonstrate both his inflation claim, and another claim: that the aristocrats of Balzac’s day were so far ahead of the rest of society in the 19th century that there was really no point in ever trying to catch them by hard work—it would be much better to marry into wealth and live off of that money (as many of Balzac’s characters attempt to do). That’s it. As far as they go, Balzac and Austen are fine ways of making Piketty’s points more concrete for a mass audience, but Piketty makes no attempt to demonstrate the existence of something called the patrimonial novel. (And nor should he; he’s writing a work of economics, not literary criticism.)
Read previous Dish on Piketty here, here, here, and here, and read the Dish thread “A Global Tax On The Super Rich?” here.
The Dish 