I chewed my toast, considering this, and between glances at Brigid looked all around the room with equal attentiveness, just so it wouldn’t seem like I was particularly fixated on her face (so sharp-boned and precise, but with a pleasant suggestion of former plumpness everywhere smudging it faintly with voluptuous life) and happily analogous body. Certainly she would make a welcome addition to any threesome.

“Is there a mosquito?” she asked. “Or what are you looking at everywhere?”

The acute capitalist crisis of 2008 has in the years since developed into a chronic complaint, to be managed but not overcome. In wealthy countries, ultra-low interest rates prop up consumer spending and, for investors, inflate the value of stocks, bonds, and other paper or digital assets. Swollen private portfolios induce luxury spending, and the size of the resulting wealth effect, as Alan Greenspan liked to call it, does a lot to determine what volume of crumbs spills from the banquet table in the form of worker’s wages. Because the rich spend a smaller proportion of their income than others, asset-price Keynesianism, as it has been called, is an inefficient way to inject demand into an economy. But the method has its allure: what could suit the rich better than rapidly rising prices for what they have to sell – namely, financial assets – while prices of the ordinary goods and services that they buy fall short of even the 2 per cent annual increase sought by central bankers as a minimum rate of inflation? To purchase the results of toil with the weightless gyrations of fictitious capital is a good bargain.

The inherent amateurishness of the novel, of its writers and implied readers alike, seems vital in this. Not that no authors relied on writing novels to make a living; obviously many did and do. But (as the fictional novelist Bill Gray remarked in Mao II) the novel was essentially a democratic form, and writing one a feat that potentially anybody could pull off at least once. Among the audience, even less expertise or specialization was required. To read a novel you had to be literate and to take an interest in life as it’s lived by individuals, and that was about it. The great novelistic subjects—manners, family, growing-up, alienation, friendship, nostalgia, running away, love—tended to be things everyone had experienced, feared, or fantasized about. The novel portrayed common elements of life in a way that could be commonly understood, something true even in the case of the more rebarbative texts of the avant-garde. Malone Dies or The Waves or The Dead Father may have taxed some peoples’ patience, but they didn’t really defeat anybody’s powers of cognition; a few exceptions prove the rule that there’s no such thing as “difficult fiction,” an expression favored by people who never read anything truly difficult at all. Fundamentally, the novel implied that ordinary language and untutored insight furnished adequate devices for the understanding of individual life, and that prose was their proper medium. An economist or psychologist or sociologist would naturally possess a store of knowledge about his discipline, and therefore about the world, that a nonspecialist lacked, but the same scholar had to stand and face his own life—only one tidy corner of which could be illumined in technically economic, psychological, or sociological terms—with the same basic ignorance and amateurishness uniting everybody else, including the novelist. Even a middle-aged person too busy with work and family to read novels still knew that no other book than a novel could be written about his life that would do the least justice to that life in its complex way of taking place, as it had to, simultaneously in his head, in his household, in his society, and in history. The novel formed the shared culture of a literate secular society trying to apprehend life, or at least feeling that in principle life could be apprehended, through the medium of fictional narrative prose. Whatever far reaches of scholarship, analysis, introspection, or euphony any other variety of writing attained, there was as much justice as arrogance in what D.H. Lawrence said: “Being a novelist, I consider myself superior to the saint, the scientist, the philosopher, and the poet, who are all great masters of different bits of man alive, but never get the whole hog.”

[...] "successful" young writer: enthusiastic reviews; a brief life on the best-seller lists; translation into a dozen languages; and an option deal from a Hollywood producer with deep pock-ets. These very welcome developments coincided with the worst depressive episode of my adult life. I can't say what caused it, but I remember thinking of the poet Philip Larkin's line about bursting "into fulfillment's desolate attic."

Why should it have felt desolate? I'd always wanted to write novels and was now in a good position to go on doing just that. Part of the trouble seems to have been that your own fulfillment is no one else's, and therefore not even quite your own. Surely another part was that even the so-called systems-novelists I especially admired when I was younger alluded to the principal system, the economic one, more than they described or explained it: a trait of their work that had become less satisfying to me, without my knowing how to do things differently in my own. For now let it be enough to confess that I would like to live in a more fulfilling society or civilization than a self-destructive capitalist one (where, as it happens, the leading cause of death for middle-aged men in the richest country of the world is now suicide) and that these essays have been, among other things, a way of saying so. If they're assembled here in hopes of contributing to left politics, their origin probably lies in a wish to find, outside of art, some of the artistic satisfaction that comes of expressing such deep concerns that you cannot name their source.

In fact Diana thought Adam’s long article on peak oil was so-so, something someone else could have written. She seems to prefer romanticizing him as some genius. Now, however, she is glad to have read it.

“Even then, though, come on.” Sam is flustered by his older sister trespassing into the boys’ club. “It’s not like there’s a lack of energy. Even just the tides — there’s all the energy we could want.”

Diana says nothing about the difficulty there must be in making the least use of the waves. She just says: “I don’t know.” The complexity of the world sometimes feels to her like an index of its fragility, and a tremor of very ill-defined social or political dread flutters through all these leaf-cluttered summer days, with the flags asleep on their poles.

Daniel works in Westwood for a medium-size production company. For the time being he is making enough money that he suffers Diana to stay at home, rising late, trying to write, and occasionally depositing into their joint account a check of several hundred dollars for a book review published in some prestigious outlet. As for the psychological superstructure sponsored by this economic base, you might say that Daniel absorbs Diana’s anxiety and other outsize moods, while Diana prods Daniel out of his mere decency and competence into a liveliness he might not otherwise experience. And of course there is much more than that going on. But she respects their happiness enough not to investigate its sources.