When the Recession Hit Literature

If the recession began in the last months of 2007, it hit literature in the first months of 2010. Around that time, a trio of high-profile novels featuring amoral money-grubbers appeared. Jonathan Dee’s The Privileges  (January 2010) told the story of a shady and outrageously successful New York financier and his wife. Adam Haslett’s Union Atlantic  (February 2010) followed a criminally ambitious banker. Sebastian Faulk’s A Week in December (published in the U.S. in March 2010) included a hedge-fund manager “whose heart beat only to market movements.” By the time these novels appeared, journalists and economists had already exposed much of the faulty financial systems’ workings; in early 2010, novelists attempted to explain the hubris, ambition, impatience, and iniquity that were their cause or consequence.