The Aftermath

Under the Covers with Justin Bauer

by Justin Bauer

In the spring of 2006, the last extended debate over the role of current events in art came to a head. The reason was Paul Greengrass' movie United 93; the question was whether five years after the fact was "too soon" to create a fictional representation of a still-fresh national crisis.

Newer crisis-inspired stories have emerged more quickly and much less controversially. Four years after Katrina, we've seen Tom Piazza's excellent City of Refuge and Dave Eggers' heartbreaking Zeitoun. And the ongoing recession, which has inspired a trickle of up-to-the-moment novels, raises no flags about exploitation or rushing disaster stories into the marketplace. Maybe these concerns should be brought up, though — not necessarily because these financial-crisis novels are insensitive or exploitative, exactly, but instead because it still might be just too soon to understand the extent of a slow-motion continued collapse, and to accurately chart its impact on everyday life.

Take, for instance, Gabrielle Zevin's The Hole We're In (Grove, March 10), which sprawls over 22 years starting in 1998, and lays out the stories of two generations of the Pomeroy family. God-fearing assistant principal Roger decides, in an opening chapter set at his son's graduation from Yale, to go back to school for the Ph.D. he feels he deserves. This selfish choice spins off a chain of consequences for his entire family.

The immediate effect of Roger's schooling is debt — the house he can't afford, the tuition he doesn't pay and the credit-card bills that cover one daughter's medical expenses and another's dissatisfying wedding. But Zevin is just as concerned with Roger's fundamentalist faith (which she renders entirely unsympathetically), the impact of the Iraq war on our returning soldiers and even the politics of abortion. In fact, it is fierce daughter Patsy who gains our sympathy and provides the most resonant storyline with her difficult return from Iraq. But her family's saga has been wrapped in a credit-card mock-up dust jacket that flattens and distorts expectations heading into the novel and elevates one comparatively underbaked element to the role of central thesis.

Judging The Hole We're In by its cover might be convenient, but it's useful shorthand for a pretty common mismatch between topical financial ambitions and novelistic contents. Books as dissimilar as Adam Haslett's Tom Wolfe-style panorama of investment banking in Union Atlantic, the scabrous comic set pieces of Sam Lipsyte's The Ask and Jonathan Dee's finely drawn if deeply static character studies in The Privileges, all confront the financial crash and its aftermath, but in the same way blind men confront elephants — incompletely, and without the benefit of sufficient perspective.

Significantly, the most satisfying and accomplished of these state-of-the-nation novels consciously shoves the recession off to the periphery. Lionel Shriver's So Much For That (Harper, March 9) opens with Shep Knacker about to leave for the early retirement he's been fantasizing about all his working life, prepared to head off to a third-world tropical paradise to live on pennies a day with or without his family. His wife Glynis' diagnosis of mesothelioma, spitefully withheld until after his parting speech, consigns Shep instead to endless hospital visits, the humiliation of remaining in a job he hates for the insurance and the evisceration of his nest egg to fund his wife's inexorable decline.

So Much for That is unrelentingly bleak. The other stories Shriver pulls from Shep's periphery merely provide overtones of Glynis' story, from best friend Jackson's chronically ill daughter to Shep's father's sojourn in a nursing home. The exhaustive scope comes at the expense of aesthetics, perhaps — some of her storylines strain credulity; minor characters like Shep's sister flatten into mere functional paper tigers; and the pileup of medical and bureaucratic humiliation gets (convincingly, depressingly) wearing.

Even as Shriver examines catastrophic care comprehensively and devastatingly, even as she tracks the steady spend-down of Shep's dreams and Glynis' possibilities by disclosing his bank statement at the start of each chapter, Shriver's best assets are her exhausted, unpleasant, enduring characters. Glynis' rawness, Shep's stoic disappointment and the worn-in, contentious, occasionally lustful and even lively relationship between the couple underscore the hopelessness of disease while sidestepping any lingering Love Story clichés. Most remarkably, Shriver accomplishes the most difficult task in exploring a society's crises in fiction — she transforms a set of issues that are immediate and timely into a setting of a relationship that shows their greatest costs as the human ones.

(j_bauer@citypaper.net)