Narrating the crisis. Fictions of finance in contemporary British novels

This article examines how the 2008 financial crisis has been reconfigured in a selected sample of contemporary British novels. I argue that the financial crisis has inspired moderation in fiction, a kind of self-imposed austerity on the part of novelists who have chosen a safe investment (realism), avoiding more hazardous speculations in new forms. The cultural work the novels under scrutiny perform is more descriptive than predictive. In this respect, they are truly post-crisis novels – committed to refiguring normalisation and readjustment within the fictional space of the text. These novels engage the capitalist realist perspective mostly by imagining a return to order while narrating the crisis. But in so doing they also betray an anxious sense that this return is faulty and uncertain: the endings of the various stories narrated (not just the financial plots) are blatantly strained – generous doses of romance in A Week in December, an unrealistic redistribution of wealth in The Empathy Problem, and a promise of change that changes nothing in Capital.