Jonathan Dee's The Privileges

...For all its considerable perceptiveness and subtlety, The Privileges doesn't tell us much about the actual working lives of the hedge fund managers and I-bankers who created the housing bubble and the now infamous tranches of credit-default swaps...

...They ate rack of lamb, they saw Tiki Barber," is how Adam summarizes, for himself, a rare evening out in the culture, a gala fund-raiser on the Intrepid aircraft carrier...

...In other words, Balzac's tale of credit also stages the way that readers come to buy into it...

...When Adam confesses his sin to his "Cyn," she only says, "Let them come after us...

...What sets them apart is their vigorously lasting marriage, a rare enough thing in American letters after John Updike and Philip Roth, and rare enough in American life...

...Strength and fitness, however, are not Aristotelian or even industrial virtues but inherent qualities, like Calvinist "grace...

...Why hadn't he understood it before now...

...Dee gets the cadences and phrases of the new upper-class frat-house idiom just right: the gratuitously vulgar "ballsiness," the mixture of intellectual curiosity and defensive ignorance about recent and not-so-recent history ("whatever must have been there"), the insertion of "kind of" to neuter a strong judgment and render it ambivalent...

...Dee's novel traces the fortunes of a young couple, Adam and Cynthia Morey, "Cyn," as Adam calls her, from their wedding day to their children's first year of college, a twenty-year period from roughly 1989 to 2009, although Dee has carefully scrubbed it of any notable temporal markers...

...The Credit Crisis and the Novel MARCO ROTH The Privileges by Jonathan Dee Random House, 2010, 272 pp., $25 After the fall of 2008, when the American economy revealed itself to have been a particularly elaborate house of cards, after the astonishment and the rage and the losses still to be reckoned, those of us who hadn't lost too much—or whose unemployment at least offered time for reading in libraries not yet closed by state budget cuts—could search for novels about the very financial elites whose bubble-blowing actions proved so destructive to everyone but themselves...

...He'd give their children everything too, risk anything for them...

...If you take 5000 francs from my dresser, you'll go to jail, but if you fire the imagination of a thousand investors with the thought of an easy return, you can get them to pay you for the privilege of acquiring the debt of some bankrupt kingdom or republic...

...It's a minor but telling instance of the many inefficiencies of our supposedly free market system that we expect novelists to keep to a narrow realism inadequate to the realities we face, yet continually reward our bankers when they get away with criminal acts of creative finance...

...Balzac, often on the run from his own creditors, understood that the goal was to become "too big to fail...

...The Horatio Alger myth and the nineteenth-century American Dream, for all their baloney, were at least cast in terms of virtue rewarded: hard work, thrift, courage, and temperance were the formulas for success...

...The novel's very strength doesn't allow him to show one of the things readers most want to know: how even a fairly ordinary person could be changed into a Nietzschean supervillain by the act of selling bad debt in a credit bubble...

...The union-busting sins of the Carnegies, the Rockefellers, the Fords would be expatiated with cultural monuments, endowments, foundations...

...Verver's money allows him to aspire to something beyond raw capitalism...

...The resemblance between this kind of persuasion, the art of the deal, and the art of the novel was not lost on one of the originators of literary realism, a writer who also happened to be Karl Marx's favorite novelist, Honor...

...He doesn't want Sanford's patronage...

...The noblest risks were the secret ones...

...He wants to create "a museum of museums," "set down by his hands as a house on a rock—a house from whose open doors and windows, open to grateful, to thirsty millions, the higher, the highest knowledge would shine out to bless the land...

...Dee grasps perfectly one of the strangest phenomena of the new American upper classes, with their "safe rooms," their libertarian politics, and their paranoia: their survivalist ideology and the nihilism beneath it...

...Jonathan Dee permits neither himself nor his readers such fantasies...

...It also means that a flag of light allegory flutters around the novel and its principal characters— Morey as in slippery predatory eel, the people with more, a pair of exemplary primal lovers for our time (social mores meets that's amore...

...To measure how imaginatively impoverishing this social Darwinist ideology can be, for the new rich and for the rest of us, it's worth contrasting Adam Morey's limited ambition to survive and reproduce with the ambition of another American Adam, a self-made titan from a previous century's fiction, Adam Verver in Henry James's The Golden Bowl...

...Dee's novel gives us the mentality, not the methods of Wall Street...

...Surely nemesis is around the corner, but nemesis never arrives...

...April, the girl, paralyzed by a fear of poverty and poor people and the sense that her battles have all been fought for her by her parents...

...The listeners are always assessing Bixiou's performance, both for its credibility and for his literary skill...

...It takes real imagination to owe a lot of money...

...James also understood his character to be a kind of latter-day buccaneer in pursuit of high culture: "To rifle the Golden Isles had become on the spot the business of his future," he tells us, but there was at least the sense, not entirely untrue as it turned out, that private money could be converted into tangible public good...

...Is there anything to be learned from such retrospective explorations of the inner lives of America's latest aristocracy...

...Balzac, however, gives it to us at third hand: an anonymous man has dinner in a restaurant, the kind of fancy restaurant we all wish we could get into and know we probably can't, and overhears a party of journalists and stockbrokers discussing the house of Nucingen...

...descriptions of clothing are applauded or criticized...

...He knew what he was risking...

...Adam remembers that his parents used to leave him with the neighbors, but he doesn't live in that community any more: "as a family, they were a little more of an island, for better or for worse, than he'd realized...

...Those most remote from actual subsistence living imagine themselves as supreme hunter-gatherers, as though the civilization they move seamlessly through in their custom tailoring was synonymous with some daily "struggle for existence...

...Anyone who tried such a formal exercise today, as William Gaddis tried in his novel about Wall Street, JR, would be tarred with the brush of postmodernism...

...Social Darwinism reveals itself to be a luxury good, a philosophy acquired as one moves up the great chain of American being...

...Such scrupulous lack of historical consciousness may be taken as one sign of the Moreys' general indifference to society, as Margaret Thatcher used the word...

...Like the word "guilt," the word "debt" does not appear in the novel's pages, although the latter is an accidental and the former a calculated omission...

...But Dee's assumption of contemporary literary fiction's favored mode of "voice-driven" psychological realism also leads his readers to the sense that the very rich are, for the most part, moral agents mostly like you and me, even if they fail to see themselves that way...

...two large buildings do not go down in a terrorist attack...

...Bixiou apologizes, edits himself...

...The stepfather pays for her wedding, even though Cynthia mostly refuses to talk to him...

...In what ways were these architects of our doom people just like us, but with more money...

...Self-deludingly, perhaps, Henry James imagined that his master capitalists felt a combination of humility before and democratic equality with masters of other domains...

...But, only at a certain scale, as another character observes: Kill one man, they'll guillotine you...

...Verver's ambition is manifestly public, almost religious, rather than private...

...The main story is told by Bixiou, the shadowy, louche journalist from Lost Illusions, but the other characters constantly chime in, always in character, "Couture is so good at short-selling, he's anticipated the end of my story," Bixiou says after one annoying interruption...

...Adam thinks that "in its inappropriateness the house was so self-absorbed that it could have sprung fully formed from the head of Sanford's awful wife...

...Marco Roth is a founding editor of n+1 magazine...

...He was equal somehow with the great seers, the invokers and encouragers of beauty—and he didn't after all perhaps dangle so far below the producers and creators...

...he wants to remain, as he's always imagined himself, perfectly autonomous: It wasn't enough to trust in your future, you had to seize your future, pull it up out of the stream of time, and in doing so you separated yourself from the legions of pathetic, sullen yes-men who had faith in the world as a patrimony...

...Cynthia brushes off her stepsister, a depressed graduate student at New York University, and her reasoning provides one of the novel's keynotes: Everyone thought they could keep playing this family card with her to get her to do what they wanted...

...Yet they'd only be practicing realism...

...Sentences like that allow Dee to build up our sympathy for his otherwise unremarkably obnoxious protagonists...

...still, the sheer ballsiness of it, the arrogance required to raze whatever must have been here before in order to erect this monstrosity precisely where it didn't belong, was kind of impressive...

...They even interrupt to go off on an enormous digression on whether Bixiou's style sounds more like Diderot in Rameau's Nephew, French eighteenth-century theater, or bad melodrama...

...Although a monarchist and supporter of the old French aristocracy of blood, Balzac was able to make the connection between the reader's "willing suspension of disbelief" and the credit and banking economy as it evolved in nineteenth-century Europe...

...No wrong for him but whatever was wrong in her eyes...

...His dick is bigger than yours," Cynthia shouts at a group of men, clustered around her in the frat-party atmosphere of an Upper East Side bar, once Adam returns with their drinks...

...de Balzac...

...Understanding that only more money can give them more freedom, Adam moves to a hedge fund where he quickly becomes the favorite of his apparently deeply bored boss, Barry Sanford, a character whose name, physical characteristics, and passion for yachting conjure a distinct resemblance to Allen Stanford, the bank owner and financier recently arrested in his tax-free island shelter of Antigua and charged with running a Ponzi scheme...

...Without satire, without editorializing, Dee's note-perfect and sharp-eyed novel makes us feel how easily, in our time, intelligent and passionate people can slide from the desire to remain proudly autonomous, that is to say free because responsibly self-regulating, into the wish to play exclusively by their own rules because they believe themselves better than everyone else...

...A life that is not struggling for its own survival is meaningless to her...

...This is not to suggest that the realities of contemporary economics are too sophisticated or too professionalized for any mere novelist to represent...

...Fortune favors the strong...

...But it was all a test of your fitness anyway...

...For the 99 percent of us who live on the wrong side of America's ever-widening income divide, inquiries into the moral and emotional lives of the I-bankers seem almost the height of poor taste, a bad joke on par with the taxpayer-funded bailout of banks that remain in private hands...

...It's a curious pecuniary truth," says one of the novel's host of storytellers, "that the debtor is always stronger than the creditor...

...That was how you kept the whole idea meaningful and powerful...

...You kept it small...

...It is out of this willed smallness, Dee suggests, that the new privileged class is made...

...Fortuna favet fortibus...

...The House of Nucingen, a lesser-known novella meant to fill-in a backstory from both P?re Goriot and Lost Illusions, turns out to be uncannily relevant to our current situation...

...And Adam, in turn, "felt invincible, like a martyr, like a holy warrior...

...Although this should not come as news to anyone who's been reading the news, it's clear enough that the only class warriors now worthy of that name are the tiny class at the top...

...These characters with their deliberate small-mindedness, their absence of beliefs—in God, historical progress, aesthetic or cultural improvement—are both attuned to the emptiness of their lives and trapped by it...

...The new American aristocrats were chiefly in the business of creating and projecting confidence, and this meant shaping and filtering what outsiders thought they knew...

...A contemporary, MFA-schooled novelist would give us that story from inside the head of one or more of the principle characters...

...The Moreys are not blind to the excesses of the overclass they aspire to join, even as their vulgarity, their irony-laced acceptance, already make them part of it...

...Privilege," in its root sense, means "private law" or law for one...

...The storyteller is always borrowing credibility from his readers and reinvesting it, just as Nucingen first takes his depositors' money and then lends it to Napoleon in exchange for real land and a noble title...

...In the Moreys' world, which is ours, money is converted instead into the coin of "self-esteem," that is to say the credit we extend to ourselves...

...That kind of meek belief in the ultimate justice of things was not in Adam's makeup...

...Indeed, our increasingly fictitious, postindustrial economy is perhaps best understood as a kind of novel intended for mass consumption...

...By the end of the evening, Bixiou is being hailed as a genius by his audience, but we don't know how much of the story to trust, whether they love him because he's confirmed their own cynical sense of how the "real world" really works...

...The omission is partly accident, but only partly: The Privileges was plotted and planned in response to a moral intuition about what certain people might do, before the nature of the current crisis was clear...

...They attract others to better proclaim their faith: "This, losers, is my husband...

...It is left to Adam and Cynthia's children, the children of privilege, to articulate the meaning of their parents' lives: the boy, Jonas, in a fruitless quest for an authentic art that will bring him face to face with a poorer kind of sociopath...

...The privileged, as we learned again, thanks to the Bush administration's ceaseless invocation of "executive privilege," are those who've managed to create for themselves a permanent state of exception within a society founded on equality under the law...

...What they know is that they want in...

...This is backward...

...Either you have it or you don't, and you must always prove to yourself that you do...

...That deadpan sentence yields a succinct metonymy of one side of Manhattan life in the late 1990s, as much by its tone as by the dish and now forgotten football star it names...

...in what ways were they very different...

...The Intrepid evening also spurs Adam to turn to the white-collar crime of "front-running," that is, a kind of insider trading based on knowing in advance whether other investors are going to buy or sell certain stocks...

...Money had to be converted into cultural prestige...

...Whether in actual historical fact or only in the historical fact of Henry James's imagination, the artist and the public good still outranked the capitalist...

...But Balzac is as much interested in how such fantasies take hold as the mere story of how Nucingen triples his fortune and enriches his friends and family...

...She believed in it more than any of them....She hadn't heard from her father in the last three years, but that didn't mean he wasn't still her father, or that anybody else was...

...No presidents or laws are mentioned...

...So small, their lives, they can barely bring themselves to trust a babysitter so they can go out for the evening...

...Banking was supposed to be safe and boringly risk-averse, as the indispensable Paul Krugman has argued, not novels...

...He invites the Moreys to visit his country house, "a white Regency style mansion so gigantic and out of place it looked like a theme park," where he lives alone with his trophy wife...

...Who were these barbarians, no longer at the gate, but entrenched firmly in our midst...

...This is as true in 2008 as it was in 1838...

...They cannot touch us...

...Word associations aside, these Moreys are mostly ordinary—he's the child of a unionized Boston pipefitter, her mother remarried a Pittsburgh lawyer after her father ran off...

...the irony was that they had no idea how deeply she bought into the idea they were so cynical about...

...A conscientious novelist invariably humanizes the characters created, yet it seems a perversion of justice for readers to extend, interest free, the credit of our compassion to the types of people who spend so much of their own emotional capital reducing the rest of us to the collateral of their speculative fantasies...

...He's at work on a memoir about AIDS and literary influence, forthcoming from Farrar Straus and Giroux...

...The challenge to readers to experience sympathy for those apparently lacking in ordinary compassion animates Jonathan Dee's The Privileges...

...Kill 500 with some sort of political conviction, they respect the necessary state crime...

...Launched in New York, where Adam begins working his way up the ladder of Morgan Stanley and Cynthia stays at home with the kids, they remain in single-minded devotion to the cult of themselves...