The following is the second of a six-part collaboration with Dirt about “The Myth of the Middle Class” writer. Check back here throughout the week for more on the increasingly difficult prospect of making a living as a full-time writer, or subscribe to Dirt to get the series in your inbox.
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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 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.
I think this lack of clarity about money arises because the stories literary authors want to tell are fundamentally upper-middle and upper-class stories.
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.
In Jane Austen’s day, the size of a man’s income was a source of open discussion—this is no longer the case.
When I wrote on this topic previously for Lit Hub a commenter said these lacunae were a result of the meritocracy—modern novelists are very concerned with creating the image that they succeeded through their own efforts, because of the way that America idealizes self-made people.
I don’t disagree that novelists have an interest in mythologizing their own origins—I simply don’t see why this ought to affect the content of their novels. An author can be honest in their own books even as they disguise their own origins in interviews—I’m being conspicuously clear and honest in this article, even as I studiously avoid discussing my own financial background, for instance.
I think this lack of clarity about money arises because the stories literary authors want to tell are fundamentally upper-middle and upper-class stories. If Ben Lerner’s protag has student loans, then he is right to worry about whether poetry or art are really life-sustaining endeavors. Similarly, if Nathaniel P can’t ever support a family, then he is right to eschew commitment with the upper-middle-class mid-thirties professional women that he tends to date. If these protagonists aren’t well off, then the authors have no business telling these particular stories about them. Thus, the logic of the books demands that they have some kind of financial privilege—so why elide that privilege from the text?
For whatever reason, authors of literary fiction seem very invested in creating dramas of the meritocracy: stories about the internal, emotional turmoil of talented people who, it is assumed, deserve all their current or future success. I can only assume this is because in the 21st century there is some market for these dramas in a way there was not in the 19th-century. And because to write about money honestly would inevitably puncture the illusion that it plays no role in contemporary life, authors find ways of gliding over the parts of the book where money would naturally come up.
One could imagine that a majority of readers—a middle-class, let’s call them—is asking for these stories, perhaps because they want to be reassured that the world is fair. But the middle-class also loves TV shows and movies about useless and undeserving people, whether it’s the Real Housewives, Succession, Gossip Girl, or any of literally hundreds of other examples. If anything, the middle-class seems to want to be reassured that the Nathaniel Ps of the world are actually feckless and undeserving rich kids.
Perhaps it is the upper- and upper-middle-class itself that desires these dramas. They want to read about self-determining individuals who are stymied only by their own internal conflict. But I’m a member of this class myself, and I can’t see why we should want such a thing when in our daily lives we are so aware that this is simply not how the world works.
It is suggestive that it’s in literary fiction where money-talk is the most taboo. Commercial novels frequently touch on money and occupation—it’s a main driver of conflict in romance and crime novels in particular. But literary fiction is largely removed from mass opinion and is shaped by a small number of critics, editors, and agents, mostly from elite backgrounds themselves. It’s certainly possible that part of the class replication strategy for upper- and upper-middle-class literati involves suppressing mention of money in literature. If so, I can only lament the harm this suppression does to the work in question.
I’m not particularly moved by considerations of fairness—most literary writers come from privileged backgrounds. That’s true today, and it was true in Austen’s time as well, and I don’t see it ever changing (even in the Soviet Union, it was rare for a successful writer to be from a peasant or proletarian background). But I do think this silence about money seriously harms the work on an artistic level.
Leaving Atocha Station, The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P, and Detransition, Baby are amongst the best and most honest novels of the last decade, and yet these stories are seriously compromised by silence about money. In the attempt to have it both ways—to tell stories about moneyed people without mentioning money itself—the authors end up writing tales that don’t make any psychological sense. Characters become hysterical over subjects that seem not to merit worry, and they don’t worry about things that ought to be of great concern.
Money can’t be expunged from the text, it can only be repressed, and in being repressed, these novels become the site of a neurosis that can be endlessly discussed but never quite explained.
