The post-1945 American novel was usually in some deep way about anxiety: the anxiety of living in America, with its enormous postwar wealth and its correspondingly enormous social pressures and opportunities. The great hope of its characters, like the great hope of America generally, used to lie in social mobility: up, up, and away! But in the 21st century, to hear young writers tell it, the social pressures have won. Anxiety, in the contemporary American novel, has given way to defeatism and pointillist satire: finely honed accounts of a calcified class system, or of its guilt-stricken bourgeois-bohemian alternatives (see the current crop of Berlin expat novels).
We know what has happened. The increasing concentration of resources in the hands of a tiny cluster of gargantuan corporations; the transfer of manufacturing operations from the American heartland to China and the Global South, where labour is cheap; the rise of online retail, with its seductive conveniences and its indifference to the environment … the postwar social tapestry has been unravelled. Luxury at the top, fear in the middle, serfdom at the bottom, and nobody going anywhere: this is the reality with which the novelist of contemporary American life must wrestle.
