ABSTRACT
It is no accident that a genre of economic narratives centered on the home arrives at a moment of accelerated financialization driven by real-estate speculation and mortgage debt. Real estate became the face of the shift from production to finance, with domestic anxieties about American economic competitiveness articulated, most famously, around the sale of Rockefeller Center to Japanese investors in 1989. Even as the novel offers some of the historical material necessary for reading structures, not persons, as the primary text of American social distribution, its confessional narrator demonstrates the persistence of cautionary moral realism as a lens for understanding an economy in which nothing seems real anymore. The domestic ripples of global real-estate speculation are channeled through the local savings-and-loan bank. Rising property values, joined with downward pressure on real-estate taxes, offset the increasing instabilities of a risk-driven economy.
