Representations of Neoliberal Financialization in the Twenty-First-Century US Novel

This thesis examines the ways in which twenty-first-century US novels represent neoliberal financialization. In this thesis, ‘neoliberal financialization’ refers to the increasing prevalence of finance in the economy enabled by the neoliberal policy implemented in the US since the 1970s. I argue that twenty-first-century novels move away from the dominant literary mode of ‘lyrical realism’, as described by Zadie Smith, and instead employ a considerable range of forms and genres to represent contemporary financialization. However, at the same time as these formal and generic experimentations, these novels narrate familiar themes and tropes: they continually represent financialization through narratives of family and the workplace. I examine what forms neoliberal financialization takes in novels, what novels reveal about financialization, and the extent to which financialization both encourages and restricts the novelistic imagination.

Across two Parts and four Chapters, I read six novels in this thesis. In Part I, I examine how the family mediates, and even occasionally acts as a proxy for, financial crisis. Here, I read the speculative naturalism of Lionel Shriver’s The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047 (2016) and the adulterous hybrid realisms of Martha McPhee’s Dear Money (2010) and Jess Walter’s The Financial Lives of the Poets (2009). In Part II, I examine how the white-collar workplace is a key location at which the novel can narrate an individual’s relation to financialized capitalism. Here, I read the neoliberal national allegories of David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King (2011) and Colson Whitehead’s Apex Hides the Hurt (2006), as well as Jennifer Egan’s formally kaleidoscopic A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010).