![\"unionatlantic\"](\"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/06\/unionatlantic.jpg\")
<\/p>\nBy Max Dunbar.<\/p>\n
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Union Atlantic<\/em><\/a>, Adam Haslett, Atlantic 2010<\/p>\n Writing about the fashionable insularity of twenty-first century British fiction, D J Taylor identified in 2007 \u00a0‘the fatal detachment<\/a> of the modern ‘literary’ writer from the society that he or she presumes to reflect’:<\/p>\n [G]lobalisation, the rise of the international money markets, the creation of a virtual economic world fundamentally detached from the processes of ordinary life – the number of contemporary writers capable of understanding their complexity, much less rendering them into fictional form, is painfully limited.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n After the great crash, Nick Cohen expanded on this<\/a>, pointing out that the only response to the global crisis the creative world could come up with was an adaptation of Dickens’s Little Dorrit. <\/em>Like Taylor, we have to look across the Atlantic. F Scott Fitzgerald chronicled the mania and comedown of the 1920s, and Jay McInerney did the same for the 1980s with his masterful Brightness Falls <\/em>– still standing, way above Bonfire of the Vanities, <\/em>as the great American novel of that decade.<\/p>\n Union Atlantic<\/em>‘s rogue trader, Doug Fanning, employs a secretary who is struggling to finish a novel on the Spanish Civil War. Fanning looks down on the admin drones who use the market to subsidy some creative dream: ‘until they no longer noticed the bargain struck between meaningless days and whatever private comforts they’d found to convince themselves the meaningless was worth it.’ Like Fielding Goodney, Doug sees himself as ‘an artist of the consequential world’:<\/p>\n A shaper of fact. Not the kind of author Sabrina wanted to be – some precious observer of effette emotion – but the master of conditions others merely suffered.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Despite the above, Doug is not a creature of energy. He doesn’t dominate your attention in the style of Don Draper or John \u00a0Self; it’s only at the sharp and poignant ending that he really comes alive. Similarly, Haslett’s novel is less a David Simon-style Victorian \u00a0bustle than a well-realised social tragicomedy.<\/p>\n The plot is driven by Doug’s fiscal chicanery, the \u00a0setting is \u00a0Manhatten 2002 with the Iraq war like a descending note in the background. There are long, beautifully written expository passages that tell Doug’s story as the capitalist crisis in microcosm. But most of the action takes place in the suburbs of Massachusetts where Haslett is content to let his characters corrall and stalk each other.<\/p>\n As a character, Doug is consistently outshined by Charlotte Graves, a retired history teacher and local eccentric who is trying to sue the town for letting Doug build a monstrosity of a house on her family’s land. Still haunted by a long-ago love affair, Charlotte \u00a0regales her \u00a0private student with \u00a0passionate free associations on centuries of American history. \u00a0At a garden party, she confronts Doug when he snidely \u00a0speculates on her reasons for leaving the profession:<\/p>\n Most of my fellow teachers, and the textbooks for that matter, presented the material as if it were a simple record, a kind of newscast to be placed in front of the young… I had the temerity to suggest that certain developments in human society were better or more dangerous or more evil than others, and I’m not talking about your twentieth-century horrors, the ones they throw in for free. The despoilers. The patriots of capitalism. Given the ubiquity of your type these days, is it any surprise they forced me out? \u00a0<\/p><\/blockquote>\n For all her fire, though, Charlotte’s is a story of failure and isolation \u00a0and a \u00a0case stufy \u00a0of a powerful mind beginning to slip.<\/p>\n Haslett probably made the \u00a0right decision to set his novel early in the 2000s rather than try to record the madness as it unfolded. In Philippe Legrain’s Aftershock<\/em>, <\/em>which we looked at a couple of days ago<\/a>, the economist explained that we have always had bubbles and crashes, but they are happening with more regularity: the stock market crash of ’87 followed by the dotcom boom and crash of the early 2000s and now the property bubble followed by meltdown. Legrain also noted how fast lessons are unlearned: the champagne pyramids are frothing again in Square Mile bars and Northern Rock is still doing its silly mortgages. This will continue until the next crash and after it, not least because there is no real sanction for failure anyway.<\/p>\n By placing Union \u00a0Atlantic’s case in isolation, Haslett uses it as a \u00a0portrait of human spasm and the symptom of a wider problem. The effect is like watching a mushroom cloud in a snowglobe.<\/p>\n![\"max-photo-41\"](\"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/04\/max-photo-41-150x150.jpg\")
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