“My daughter lives in Wisconsin and that place is just — everybody raves about that place,” the woman said. Other members of the tour started whispering to each other and shrugging. Melting Pot? What’s a Melting Pot?

“It’s a fondue restaurant,” said a man in a suit who’d been sitting quietly in the corner. Strang introduced him as the mall’s manager. “See, it’s set up with these individual kind of cubbies, and they do seatings of seven and nine,” the manager said, then realized that this level of detail probably wasn’t necessary. He crossed his arms, raised his eyebrows, and said, “It’s an experience.”

“We have them in a number of our properties,” Strang said. “If anybody’s driven by Buffalo in the last few years, we just did a renovation there. And they have a Melting Pot, a P. F. Chang’s, a Cheesecake Factory — ” The woman in pink clapped her hands. “Oh see, that too, a Cheesecake Factory!”

I stared at the notebook on the table in front of me. In it I’d written a list of Destiny USA amenities that had gone by the wayside over the years. My plan was to ask questions as if I’d just stepped out of a time machine from 2002. How much did it cost to play the back nine on Onondaga Dunes? Stuff like that. But I didn’t have the courage to do it. For some reason, I figured that a mall tour scheduled for the middle of a weekday would coax other unemployed cranks like me from their caves for the rare opportunity to harangue Destiny USA executives in person. But my compatriots were nice people, the kind who came to the mall on a summer afternoon to buy presents for their grandchildren. My bitterness dissolved inside a steaming pot of gooey cheese.

Destiny USA, and Carousel Center before it, could not have “happened” anywhere else but here. And not just here, in Syracuse, but on the frothy, stinking shores of Onondaga Lake. If it wasn’t the most polluted lake in the country, if it didn’t sit smack in the middle of a Rust Belt city verging on bankruptcy, Congel would have neither abandoned land to grab nor the political leverage to exploit it. Had he hawked his megamall to any community located on any of the other Finger Lakes — the affluent resort town of Skaneateles, say, where the Congel clan owns multimillion-dollar mansions — they would’ve told him to take a hike.

For days now I’ve been talking to everybody I can find, asking them how long they’ve been raw, how they found the diet, how they make it work financially, what they eat, why they eat it, and what they think about the rift that has opened up between Durianrider and Freelee and the remaining WFF pioneers. Mostly what I’ve learned is that nobody wants to discuss the controversy. Instead, we talk endlessly about food: what kinds of fruit we could buy where we lived, what kinds we wanted to try, our dietary goals and aspirations. Many were working to become fully raw, and those who were already strove for intense cleansing or fasting. Many said they were “always hungry” or “always thinking about food.” It’s generally believed that the development of agriculture made civilization possible, freeing early humans from lives in which nearly all of their time had to be spent planning and pursuing food. But you could also say that agriculture, and the divisions of labor it propagated, created the ancestors of our present-day lifestyle options — specializations in class, consumption, and daily routine that have grown more numerous and finely demarcated over time. Lifestyle differentiation made possible lifestyle choice, including the choice to adopt a lifestyle in which you would once again spend nearly all of your time thinking about eating.

The room is dark and smells like a sleeping person; there are records and DVDs everywhere, and a suitcase flung open on the floor that’s piled high with clothes. I ask Juice whether it’s all he brought to New York and he says yes. He is wearing a hoodie and a jacket with the NBC logo on the back, and something about seeing him in this context, living with other people in a Williamsburg apartment, makes me imagine walking past him in the street not knowing who he is; I realize that I’d probably dismiss him as a typical hipster dressed in corny thrift-store scraps. When Juice asks whether I want to hear some of his new songs, I wonder how many of the people I write off in this way go home to a room where they make things they’ve devoted their lives to.

“Look,” he says later, when I admit that the Extreme Animals stuff hadn’t really done it for me, and that noise music in general has always utterly mystified me. “You have to understand . . . I feel embarrassed that this is what I’ve spent my life doing. In a way, it’s really bleak. Like when you’re so deep in the vortex of a certain kind of niche culture, it’s easy to take it as your reality. But when you step outside of it, it can just look so dumb, you know?”

Invocations of “since the 1970s” pepper Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, making the decade one of the few punctuating moments in Piketty’s otherwise glacially paced account of the patterns of wealth distribution. Since the 1970s, as Piketty’s data starkly demonstrate, private wealth has spiked upward in the West at the expense of income growth, returning us to a social landscape close to that of the fin de siècle; the Me Decade wrote the epitaph for an exceptional postwar period of relative equality that looks to be unrepeatable. In more avowedly Marxist treatments of the decade, it appears as a decisive period — one in which crucial struggles were taking place over the Big Things: the factory floor, financial markets, and global military power. Giovanni Arrighi, in The Long Twentieth Century, reads the Seventies as the moment when labor audacity in the West and decolonization in the South forced Western governments into prioritizing the interests of private high finance, which enabled them to maintain economic hegemony even as it set the stage for a long-term decline and significantly greater, and more frequent, monetary crises. Robert Brenner’s The Economics of Global Turbulence stresses the role of global manufacturing overproduction, which precipitated a vicious cycle of devaluation and cost-cutting in which workers bore the burden of austerity, a cycle that may have altered somewhat but can scarcely be said to have ended.

These competing theories present similar pictures of the decade: global tectonic shifts produced a neoliberal tsunami. Social historians naturally focus on the innumerable ground-level fights that precipitated the deluge. Rick Perlstein’s The Invisible Bridge locates a brief moment between the onset of Watergate and the Bicentennial — coincidentally, the moment depicted in several of these novels — in which a national reckoning suddenly became possible and just as suddenly was traduced. The dense, novelistic detail of Perlstein’s books has a purpose: to remind us of a friable, dispirited, suspicious country, more skeptical of its own myths, that now seems unimaginably distant. Part of that distance is due to the disappearance of the working class that still, in the mid-Seventies, commanded political and institutional power and drove mass-media representations. Jefferson Cowie’s Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class is a narrative of the fall from class into identity; for Cowie, class becomes “identitarian” in the course of the Seventies, largely as a result of the brilliantly managed Nixonian strategy of co-opting labor by selling it cultural politics — a strategy that worked, as Cowie shows, even better than its architects could have hoped. By severing “culture” from material interests it hollowed out the identity that the white working class got as a consolation prize, leaving it resentment as its nourishment — and classically confused archetypes in its wake, such as Archie Bunker or Sonny in Dog Day Afternoon.