Nobody would deny that times are tough. Money is tight, and discretionary spending is falling as quickly as the unemployment rate is rising. The poor economic climate is bound to have an impact on books and publishing – and, more specifically, on fiction – as it does on just about every other aspect of life.
There’s some disagreement in the publishing community about whether or not a recession is good or bad for business. On the one hand, books are a relatively cheap form of entertainment and they offer better “bang for the buck” than, say, movies. During the Great Depression, books sales – along with sales of just about every other consumer item under the sun – sank significantly, during less damaging recessions, such as that of the 1980s, books have seemed to benefit.
The Joad Family searching for something to read
These days are different, though. Today books don’t compete with movie tickets for discretionary spending dollars so much as they compete with “free” media on the Internet. Even in good times, reading is declining. And while the National Endowment for the Arts tried to claim that the decline in readers of literature had reversed itself in January 2009, showing an increase for the first time in twenty-five years, further study of the figures used showed that the NEA had changed its standard of measurement to include reading online material. It is absolutely indisputable that book sales have been slowing in the shadow of blogs, social networking sites, television, and all the other distractions bombarding us daily. (The effect of the new generation of electronic readers, including Amazon’s Kindle, on the sale of e-books remains to be seen and may stand as a bright spot in the bleak outlook for books, though e-books, of course, are much less expensive and offer smaller margins than hard copy bound books printed on paper.) Publishers are downsizing and eliminating many of the imprints developed during the flush years. (Imprints are smaller publishing houses within a publishing house.) Overall, the number of books being published is dropping in all categories, and fiction is no exception.
But tough economic times don’t have an impact only on book sales and book publishing – they also find their way into the material of popular fiction itself. Will readers of fiction who have been forced to tighten their belts be more likely to reach for a serious tome such as The Grapes of Wrath, or dive into fluffy escapism such as Sex and the City? Only time will tell.
The books being published at this moment, of course, were not written mere moments ago. The lag time between completing a novel or a collection of stories and seeing it in print ranges from one to three years. But there are certain themes and tropes that find their way into the zeitgeist as bad times approach and certain trends in publishing that can always be counted on to surge when consumers are holding onto their dollars more tightly.
First and foremost, publishers become increasingly risk-averse as the economy sinks. This means debut novels by unknown authors grow more and more rare, while the “sure thing” from a well-known writer – preferably one whose name crops up regularly on bestseller lists – receives top priority. Sequels such as Nelson DeMille’s The Gate House (Grand Central Publishing, 2008) and Kate Atkinson’s When Will There Be Good News? (Little Brown, 2008), another of her sly literary mysteries featuring detective Jackson Brodie, will crowd the shelves over the next couple of years. Publishers bank on the familiar drawing repeat readers, and, at the same time, they save themselves the expense of “launching” unknown authors and trying to build audiences for them.
The actual content of books may also reflect economic woes or simply grant the reader an opportunity to consider them. So-called “social novels” have been with us since the Victorian era and attempt to examine a social ill or trend through fictional characters. (The Charles Dickens tale of poor Oliver Twist is a classic example of an early social novel.) It’s debatable whether there are more stories of the rich and poor appearing on shelves, or readers tend to take more notice of them during hard economic times, but there certainly is a large flock of new novels of this type hitting bookstores now or arriving in the near future.
While it may seem contradictory, stories of the wealthy and brutal are often enjoyed during bad economic times, especially if the wealthy characters get their comeuppance in the end. Ron Rash’s Serena (Ecco, 2008) is one such novel. The book harks back to the Great Depression – it is set in 1929 – and follows a ruthless couple, Serena and George Pemberton. This married couple runs a timber business in North Carolina. First and foremost, they plan to destroy the beautiful land that they have purchased and strip it of its trees. Along the way, they treat their workers badly, but are also ruthless with others. Serena discovers that she is infertile and also that George had a child out-of-wedlock before he met her. She is subsequently horribly cruel to that child and his mother, Rachel. Rachel is depicted foraging for food in order to survive, while Serena browbeats the loggers she and her husband employ and trains an eagle she keeps as a pet to kill rattlesnakes. (She also shoots and kills a bear and attempts to impress upon her husband that to dominate his workers is the only way to be successful.) Serena was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award.
Bordeaux by Paul Torday
Same lesson, different era: In Paul Torday’s Bordeaux (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009), a man named Frances Wilberforce makes a mint in the computer business, but being rich doesn’t help him find happiness. In fact, if anything, he’s more unhappy after he makes his fortune. He also develops a serious drinking problem based on his indulgence in fine wine. Eventually he finds himself without friends or any love in his life, because alcohol takes up all his time. He acquires a vast wine collection from an acquaintance and dedicates himself to drinking his way through it. He is not particularly likeable nor is he admirable. Torday avoids sentimentality or reverence for twelve-step programs and other recovery possibilities and instead paints a portrait of a rich man who knows no satisfaction.
Count Steven Stelfox as another among the large number of rich-yet-dissatisfied characters. In Kill Your Friends (Harper Perennial, 2008), author John Niven looks back at the days when the record industry was waning. Kill Your Friends follows ruthless and disaffected A&R man Steven Stelfox. Steven does not have enough of a grasp of the big picture to realize that digital music and free downloads are about to kill off the music industry, making him obsolete. He is wholly focused on the moment and on finding the next high-earning act and scoring big.
This is the type of “social novel” that works only because of what the reader knows – i.e., that all of Steven’s preoccupations and petty concerns will soon be moot anyway. But this particular type of book has potential appeal during an economic downturn, not only because it depicts the rich as massively unhappy (hinting that it is actually preferable to be penniless), but also because it shows a character surviving something that did not seem surmountable at the time. In an odd way, these unlikable characters who have fallen from grace are an inspiration to anyone going through tough times.
The flip side of these stories of the unhappy rich are stories of the poor, who are often equally unhappy, but much, much nicer about it. Meant, perhaps, to test the theory that misery loves company and to soothe the battered feelings of those who have watched the value of their homes dip precipitously are titles like Daphne Uviller’s Super in the City (Bantam, 2009). If the booming 1990s were represented by books like Candace Bushnell’s Sex and the City (first a newspaper column, then a book, then a successful HBO series, and, finally, a movie) – frothy confections about women shopping their hearts out and tottering through Manhattan’s chic restaurants in stiletto heels – then perhaps this era will be marked by titles like Uviller’s. (Obviously with the title of her novel she’s playing on that earlier book.) Like Bushnell’s stand-in, Carrie Bradshaw, Uviller’s protagonist, Zephyr Zuckerman, has a loyal group of friends, but they’re all down on their luck. One is divorced; another is brilliant but must look for dates on the Internet. Zephyr herself has broken up with her boyfriend and failed to finish graduate school. Her parents own a brownstone in New York City and, when the super there is arrested, Zephyr takes his place, maintaining the building and learning all the secrets of its tenants – and developing her plumbing skills.
Also featuring adult children who return to the bosom of the family – if they ever left it – is If You Eat You Never Die by Tony Romano (Harper Perennial, 2008). This novel-in-stories depicts a loving recently immigrated Italian-American family in Chicago, Illinois in the 1940s. The family deals with problems related to both not having a high income and feeling out of place in the United States. Son Giacomo is ashamed of his Italian background and changes his name to Jim, while mother Lucia fears she’ll never understand her new country or its traditions. Here the poor and struggling are gentle and deserving folk piously satisfied with very little.
The Leisure Seeker by Michael Zadoorian
The senior citizen fixed-income set stars in Michael Zadoorian’s The Leisure Seeker (William Morrow, 2009), about a couple married for almost sixty years. The two set out to follow Route 66 in an RV, making one last trip. Husband John is in the throes of Alzheimer’s disease, though he’s still well enough to handle the occasional driving stint. Wife Ella can no longer drive and walks with a cane. She has breast cancer, hypertension, and kidney failure. She wears a wig due to chemotherapy-induced hair loss and rides in a motorized scooter. They tootle along, slightly confused, slightly uncomfortable, and always together. They also eat whatever they like: Recognizing that they are toward the end of their lives together, they throw nutritional caution to the winds.
The couple in Valerie Laken’s Dream House (Harper, 2009) have not been married quite as long when they purchase a home, unaware that the place was involved in a crime two decades earlier. Immediately, the purchase causes conflict in their relationship. They’ve had to borrow money from Kate’s parents, and her husband, Stuart, slacks off on the renovations. The house is in disrepair, but located in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood.
Stephen Amidon’s Security (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009), too, deals with disparities in wealth. The residents of the same small Massachusetts town inhabit different spots on the social scale. Doyle Cutler is a well-off man who employs Edward Inman to perform security detail for him. Edward is married to a woman who is attempting to climb to a higher station in life by running for mayor. Edward’s old girlfriend is struggling to maintain a meaningful relationship with her own sullen son. All of them are trying to remain mobile in a society where their positions seem fixed firmly in place.
More difficult times that have been at least somewhat overcome are depicted in Malla Nunn’s A Beautiful Place to Die (Atria, 2009), set in Johannesburg, South Africa in the 1950s, with apartheid recently instituted and awkwardly employed. This combination mystery and social novel depicts a white police officer investigating the murder of another white police officer, with the help of his own Zulu assistant, who was one of the few people who appears to have admired the dead man. Because the victim was so unpopular, there is a long list of possible suspects. The strange dance required when white and black people interacted under apartheid is depicted in full, and even the divisions among whites (the dead man was a Boer, while the investigator is an Englishman) are explored in detail.
The characters in Susan Rebecca White’s Bound South, published by Touchstone in 2009, also chafe at the boundaries set by class, with a good dose of racial division tossed into the mix. In the modern American South, Caroline Parker is a spoiled teenager raised as much by her family’s housekeeper as she is by her own mother. The housekeeper, Faye, also has a daughter, Missy Meadows, who keenly feels the absence of her biological father. Eventually Caroline leaves town to look for Missy’s father. Making her journey, Caroline is just one of a crowd of fictional characters in this season’s books who are waiting out the hard times and hoping for something better.
Recommended Titles:
The Gate House by Nelson DeMille
When Will There Be Good News? by Kate Atkinson
Serena by Ron Rash
Bordeaux by Paul Torday
Kill Your Friends by John Niven
Super in the City by Daphne Uviller
If You Eat You Never Die by Tony Romano
The Leisure Seeker by Michael Zadoorian
Dream House by Valerie Laken
Security by Stephen Amidon
A Beautiful Place to Die by Malla Nunn
Bound South by Susan Rebecca White
- Natalie Danford is the author of Inheritance, a novel published by St. Martin’s Press. She is also co-editor of the annual Best New American Voices anthology series, which introduces emerging writers. An experienced freelance writer and book critic, Natalie has published articles and reviews in People, The Los Angeles Times, Salon, and many other publications.
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