ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that there is abundant evidence to support the understanding of the relationship between fiction and finance. The very rise of the novel in English, however, was inextricably bound up with the rise of finance. The period since the 1970s has been characterized by an unprecedentedly intense phase of ‘financialization,’ in which currencies have been allowed to float free of metallic ‘backing,’ exotic forms of financial engineering have proliferated, and the financial economy has come to dwarf the ‘real’ or productive economy. A convergence between the unstable realities of finance and of fiction is evident in other contemporary novels. The novel is a fine-grained and attentive portrayal of the work-a day rhythms of life in Zadie Smith’s native North West London. The ‘notional’nature of money seems to inform Smith’s ‘meta-fictional’ highlighting of the unreality of her own characters.
