Collateral damage

In his debut novel, Adam Haslett dishes up a smart, bitingly funny look at life in the Great Recession

February 07, 2010|Brock Clarke

One of the terrible things about living in the post-bailout age is that we have to contend with the post-bailout novel, which is itself a kissing cousin to the post-9/11 novel.

For the writer of this kind of novel, there are two obstacles. First is “The Great Gatsby,’’ a novel so artful and seemingly effortless in its evocation of New York and one of its many gold rushes that it makes every other similar subsequent novel seem clunky by comparison. The other obstacle is the desire to write something important, rather than something good. Such a book usually winds up being ponderous and self-satisfied. Take, for example, Joseph O’Neill’s recent novel “Netherland,’’ which, in trying to be “The Great Gatsby’’ of our age, ended up being more like the “Gunga Din” of our age, complete with its own anguished white man and his sacrificial cricket-loving subaltern.

Fortunately, Adam Haslett’s fine first novel “Union Atlantic’’ (on the heels of his excellent short-story collection “You Are Not a Stranger Here’’) manages to avoid these problems, first by setting the novel not in New York but mostly in Boston and its suburbs (this disarms the reader because we all know that as New York goes, so goes the world, but does anything truly important happen in Boston?), and second by rejecting portentousness and embracing froth. There’s nothing backhanded about this compliment: “Union Atlantic’’ is a smart, eloquent novel about our financial wrack and ruin, but it’s also a fun novel, notable for its ability to be both brainy and soap-dishy.