ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a case study of four novels, analyzing how they treat economic issues and how they approach consumer culture. The first novel analyzed, Elizabeth Strout’s My Name is Lucy Barton, focuses on the impact on Americans of dire poverty in light of the cultural importance of financial advancement in the US. It also notes the significance of consumption, and the capacity of consumer goods to carry meaning or reify human relationships. However, the novel does not romanticize consumption, and notes its negative aspects. Philipp Meyer’s American Rust is analyzed as a study into the condition of the American Dream with particular attention paid to such aspects as deindustrialization and the crisis of American production. I argue that the book portrays the American Dream as a form of self-deception that facilitates the implementation of a market logic at the cost of the social sphere. Sophie McManus’s The Unfortunates is analyzed in terms of the continued and unwarranted power of the wealthy that puts them in a position of supreme privilege, isolating them from the problems of society-at-large, which acts to the detriment of the American people. The analysis also notes how the way Americans approach wealth contributes to the upholding of the status quo. William Gibson’s The Peripheral explores the devolvement of neoliberal capitalism into a neofeudal, postcapitalist society. I argue that the novel strikes against the totalizing utopian discourses that conceal the underlying dynamics that further financial inequality, poverty, and related social ills.
