http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2010/02/15/100215crbo_books_wood Books The Very Rich Hours Two novels about money without morals. by James Wood February 15, 2010
In his 1844 manuscripts, Karl Marx writes about money as an agent of inversion. Once I have money, Marx says, I am no longer bound by my individuality: “I am ugly, but I can buy for myself the most beautiful of women. Therefore I am not ugly, for the effect of ugliness—its deterrent power—is nullified by money. I, in my character and as an individual, am lame, but money furnishes me with twenty-four feet. Therefore I am not lame. I am bad, dishonest, unscrupulous, stupid; but money is honored, and therefore so is its possessor.” In tone and rhythm, this is a cynical visiting of St. Paul’s invocation of charity in I Corinthians, with money substituted for charity (a rewriting performed by George Orwell in his money-ridden novel “Keep the Aspidistra Flying”), and it culminates in Marx’s most comprehensive reversal: “If money is the bond binding me to human life, binding society to me, binding me and nature and man, is not money the bond of all bonds? Can it not dissolve and bind all ties? Is it not, therefore, the universal agent of divorce?”
Trapped in the implacable cash nexus of the recent recession, we have all had time to reflect on money’s demonic brilliance, watching it pose as the bond of all bonds while it has really acted as the universal agent of divorce. (To be an investor in Bernard Madoff’s exclusive and supposedly “familial” fund was to be, in effect, an ignorant child of secretly estranged parents.) Two new novels deal intelligently with the implications of the recent crisis, and are especially acute about the moral alienation of greed, and about how hungry amoralists might use and abuse the idea of the family in order to nourish their ruthlessness. Jonathan Dee’s “The Privileges” (Random House; $25) concerns itself with a golden couple, Adam and Cynthia Morey, who profit from insider trading and then establish one of New York’s leading charitable foundations, thus effectively laundering their illicit gains; Adam Haslett’s first novel, “Union Atlantic” (Nan A. Talese/ Doubleday; $26), is partly about a banker, Doug Fanning, whose appetitive overreaching brings his bank, and the financial system, to near-collapse. He is prosecuted, but slips bail and flees to the Middle East. In both novels, the protagonists are more or less successful amnesiacs. They have severed ties with their sloppy or otherwise embarrassing parents, and have no need of superfluous emotional encumbrances: they march into illegality with efficient supply lines. They see money in the avaricious way that Madame Merle, in “The Portrait of a Lady,” sees friendship: “When a friendship ceases to grow,” she thinks, “it immediately begins to decline.” Adam Morey (the name suggesting both “money” and “more” of it) finds it “unsettling to think of money in terms other than those of growth, of how it might be used to make more money. Something about it smelled of death to him but he didn’t know why.” Neither he nor Doug Fanning seems very interested in what money can buy. They get involved in shady deals because the logic of perpetual growth pushes them beyond propriety, and because they enjoy the superiority that accompanies secrecy: “More than the money, which had to be spent with some care, it was about exercising that ability to repurpose information those around him were too timid or shortsighted to know what to do with,” Adam thinks. “That was what kept the whole scheme fresh at this point, that was its engine and its reward: the sense of living in two realms at once, one that was visible to others and one that was not.”
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