We’ve entered an age of hypercapitalism. Corporate profits soar as antitrust law weakens, wages stagnate, product and service quality declines, hard-won protections for workers and consumers erode, and wealth inequality worsens. Some evangelicals now preach the “prosperity gospel”: that riches are God’s blessing, poverty his deserved punishment, and empathy how the devil gets in. It feels like everything in America is subject to privatization and profiteering, and everyone is buyable for the right price.
While short-sighted, profit-driven actions threaten stability for all, particularly the poor, excessive wealth is also bad for those who possess it, albeit in smaller, more personal ways. Pursuing money for money’s sake deadens the soul to other joys. Those born into luxury often lack a sense of purpose and gratitude. Deep pockets grant outsized power and insulation from the opinions of other people, which distorts perception of reality. That money can be toxic is an old notion: those evangelicals might do well to remember that the Bible says it’s the root of all evil, that those who covet it “pierce themselves through with many sorrows.”
In life, what constitutes excess is up for debate; after all, the dose makes the poison. In literature, it’s easier to identify the certifiably too-rich. The protagonist of my book, Bad Nature, leads a well-compensated corporate life. Her money isolates her, gives her an illusion of control, and facilitates her grandiose revenge plot. Neither her vengeance nor her funds make her happy or a good person. In fact, they make her much worse. The following books reach beyond Gatsby and Chuzzlewit to illustrate the damage money can do to those who have it.
One’s Company by Ashley Hutson
The profoundly traumatized Bonnie Lincoln is leading a downtrodden, low-wage life when she wins the lottery. Rather than using the winnings to help her struggling friend Krystal, or otherwise putting it to uses commonly considered “good,” Bonnie builds an elaborate recreation of her favorite comfort-watch, the ’70s TV show Three’s Company. Her increasing isolation from the unsafe outside world, and demented identification with the characters of the show, bring her fleeting happiness, but ultimately results in a descent toward madness and surreal, violent solipsism.
My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh
Speaking of solipsism: The anonymous protagonist of this book pioneered the art of bed-rotting with a numbing array of expensive prescription medications, bad movies on VHS, and a bottomless bank account left to her by her dead parents. She doesn’t have to work or even do laundry, leaving her free to pursue her dream of round-the-clock sleeping. Her somnolent, privileged detachment protects her from traumatic events unfolding in the outside world, yet the novel ends on a note suggesting envy for her cringingly earnest friend Reva who is wide awake to experience history in a way the narrator never will.
Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov
My Year of Rest and Relaxation has often been compared to Oblomov. Raised in privilege, the titular character barely leaves bed, lets his estate run to ruin, and spends most of his time lost in nostalgic dreams of childhood, when time seemed cyclical and safely repetitive. Unlike the nihilistic “superfluous men” of Russian classics or Moshfegh’s cynical sleeping beauty, Oblomov’s passivity is pathetic. His tragic incompatibility with a changing world leads others to both take advantage of him and pity him, but he remains terminally indecisive, stuck behind a “heavy stone … left on the narrow and pitiful path of his existence.”
JR by William Gaddis
This wildly imaginative, mind-bending, hard-to-summarize doorstopper follows its titular character, an enterprising 11-year-old boy, as he builds an empire of penny stocks and junk bonds from a payphone outside his Long Island elementary school. Its 796 pages consist entirely of dialogue and convoluted side-plots that lampoon the chaotic, nonsensical, corruptible busy-ness of free market capitalism, with characters so subordinate to the pursuit of profit that they start to feel less like people than financial instruments. Poor JR, oddly innocent despite his amorality, ends up under investigation by the IRS and SEC, while the adults he roped into his scheme fall apart.
Trust by Hernan Diaz
This book offers four conflicting perspectives of Andrew and Mildred Bevel, a married couple who enrich themselves by shorting the American economy, directly leading to the Wall Street crash of 1929. The couple grows resentful, suspicious, and competitive with each other, careless of the rest of the world, even as they lead it toward disaster. Afterward Mildred retreats to a Swiss sanatorium in shame, while Andrew devolves into desperate attempts at self-justification, using his money to shape the narrative in his favor.
Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton
As with the real-life ultra-rich, the billionaire driving the plot of Birnam Wood has mystifying motivations. He’s already extraordinarily wealthy, so why does he need to extract rare minerals from a protected New Zealand land reserve? Trying to imagine this character happy is like trying to get an animatronic shark to smile. He doesn’t get what he wants in the end, and neither do the naïve idealists who fall for his venture capitalist/philanthropist front.
Washington Square by Henry James
19th-century English literature is replete with tales of the miserable or sinful rich, often contrasted with the nobler poor. It’s difficult to choose just one, but Washington Square is a personal favorite. In it, plain, charmless Catherine falls for Mr. Townsend, a suitor who’s only after her money. Her father, Dr. Sloper, suspects Townsend’s true motivations, and so threatens to cut Catherine out of his will if she weds him. His misgivings prove well-founded, but Dr. Sloper’s cruel, controlling focus on his fortune prevents him from seeing his daughter’s humanity, and destroys their once-loving relationship.
American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
This brutal satire of extreme materialism focuses on Patrick Bateman, a perfectionist, image-obsessed Ivy League yuppie who also happens to be a psychotic predator. Scenes of cartoonishly graphic gore bookend his banal workday routines, distorting but also accentuating the violence inherent in maintaining privilege. He does “not hope for a better world for anyone,” wants to inflict his “sharp, constant pain” on others, and blends in on Wall Street with eerie ease.
The Patrick Melrose Novels by Edward St. Aubyn
These semi-autobiographical novels follow Patrick—an eloquent, caustic, elitist Englishman with a crippling drug addiction, unlimited resources, and a deeply damaged childhood—from age 5 to 45. Here money and its gloss of respectability enable truly reprehensible behavior and protect no one except the powerful.
Hyper by Agri Ismail
Rafiq, a Kurdish communist leader, flees Saddam Hussein’s Iraq for London. There he lives in poverty, rendered ineffectual by history. Having internalized the logic of Western capitalism, his three children—Siver, Mohammed, and Laika—grow up to pursue wealth, but none ever feels securely at home, no matter how much capital they amass through marriage, work, or following the market’s cues.
Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner
The Fletchers live large in Long Island off the polystyrene fortune amassed by their Holocaust-survivor grandfather. Generational wealth in no way empowers them to cope with their generational trauma, and their “kidnappable” richness also makes them a target for crime, leaving them all crippled to varying degrees by neuroses. This novel’s narrator claims to be agnostic on the question of whether it’s better to “rise to success on [your] own but never stop feeling the fear at the door” or to “be born into comfort and safety” but “never become fully realized people.” Still, this book’s scathing depiction of the rich seems to suggest an answer.