10 January 2008

Money in Fiction

I've e-mailed a publisher, Continuum, and asked for a copy of a new book, MONEY, SPECULATION AND FINANCE IN RECENT BRITISH FICTION, by Nicky Marsh.

It's a great subject for a book. When you encounter a character in a work of fiction who is identified as a banker, or as the CEO of a company, the identification often serves merely as a lazy tag, a slightly more specific way of saying "rich guy."

Some occupations just seem to naturally give themselves to literary or dramatic treatment better than others. Trial lawyers (barristers, not office-bound solicitors) are an obvious example. They win or they lose. Their client gets the jackpot or is left destitute. On the criminal side, the client walks free, or is locked up.

Journalism, too, lends itself to literature. The 1928 Broadway comedy The Front Page continues to be re-incarnated. All The President's Men doesn't work very well as an explanation of what was going on in the Nixon administration, but it does make for a good yarn about two reporters' efforts to find out what was going on -- a different theme altogether.

Then there's the occupation of soldiering, which is rather too easily dramatized. It has famously been described as days of tedium punctuated by moments of horror. The temptation, in writing about it, is to leave out the days of tedium and write about the moments of horror. The really great authors in this field can make fine prose out of the days-of-tedium aspect of the situation as well.

What about finance? speculation? fictionalizing the nitty-gritty of it while preserving the drama is a challenge, and this I presume is what drew Marsh: the meta-challenge of describing that challenge.

5 comments:

Henry said...

There must be many other occupations that would be a challenge to dramatize. A novel about a dental hygienicist, for example, might be as gripping as one about a banker or stockbroker.

Cicily Corbett said...

Henry--

Well, Philip Roth rose to your challenge in The Counterlife. Roth is my very favorite author, The Counterlife is my favorite of his books, and the scenes with dentist Henry and his dental assistant, Wendy, are the most inspired in the book.

Henry said...

I read The Counterlife when it first came out in 1987 (I've read all of Roth's novels since Portnoy's Complaint when they first came out, and own most of them in first edition), but I had forgotten the dentist. But I used dental hygienicist in my comment deliberately, on the theory that that job is duller and less apt to encounter surprises than is a dentist's. By the way, can someone tell me how to italicize in these comments?

Cicily Corbett said...

Henry--

To italicize, use html tags:
in front of the word or words to be italicized, place the letter i enclosed in a less than equal sign and a greater than equal sign; at the end, place /i between the two signs. (I can't illustate it here because the software will automatically convert it to italics in this comment!)

Henry said...

Thank you. I'm going to try it now. I'd read the statement below this box, "You can use some HTML tags ... ," but didn't know what they are; now I gather that they are these signs: < >. And it doesn't say to place the tag before the sentence and a slash followed by the letter after the sentence. Now, let's see if this sentence comes out italicized.

Knowledge is warranted belief -- it is the body of belief that we build up because, while living in this world, we've developed good reasons for believing it. What we know, then, is what works -- and it is, necessarily, what has worked for us, each of us individually, as a first approximation. For my other blog, on the struggles for control in the corporate suites, see www.proxypartisans.blogspot.com.