Authors:
Historic Era: Era 10: Contemporary United States (1968 to the present)
Historic Theme:
Subject:
June 2001 | Volume 52, Issue 4
Ten Great American Business Novels
Text Complexity Grade Level
9
It has always struck me that the best business novels are interactive. In them, the world of commerce is driven by people whose reality is made palpable to us but whose values, attitudes, and biases often compel us to question our own: As a businessperson, how would I relate to the kind of complex, unpredictable circumstances in which all-too-real fictional characters commonly find themselves? The great business novels I know are salutary, not because they afford us an escape from our office routines but precisely because they turn us back on ourselves and promote the indispensable habit of self-scrutiny. I’ve grouped the following 10 novels according to the diverse characters they portray—from predators and visionaries to escape artists and eccentrics.
One of the most memorable characters in the fictions of business is also the nastiest. William Faulkner’s Flem Snopes gives fresh meaning to the term self-interest . The Hamlet is a kind of demented depiction of the American dream. Snopes typifies the frightening ease with which an individual endowed with entrepreneurial shrewdness and killer instincts can rise from poverty to a position of wealth and commanding power over an entire community. Faulkner’s novel shows us also how powerfully fear and intimidation can force the complacent and unwary to ignore their better judgment, abdicate their authority, and, in The Hamlet, literally give the store away. Faulkner’s setting is a small Southern backwater—but it might just as well be a highly competitive corporate environment.
Theodore Dreiser’s The Financier describes the rise to power and wealth of Frank Cowperwood, a turn-of-the-(twentieth)-century titan who flouts conventional notions of morality with a winner-takeall mentality in building his empire. Unlike the abhorrent Flem Snopes, though, Cowperwood emerges as a sympathetic, even heroic, figure in a commercial frontier driven by political influence and dealmaking. In our own age, power brokers like Cowperwood, who know how to charm, cajole, and manipulate to achieve their ends, become celebrities, and we, like Cowperwood’s contemporaries, follow their schemes with fascination (and perhaps even envy).
Hardly less predatory in his way, yet the least visible character in American business fiction, is JR, the sixth-grade entrepreneur of William Gaddis’s darkly comic novel of that name. A National Book Award winner in 1976, JR uncannily anticipates the age of e-commerce by following this precocious youngster as he uses a telephone in his school as a base for building a diversified (paper) empire from a mail-order shipment of surplus Navy forks. Savvy stockbrokers, marketers, and administrators line up behind this shadowy Wunderkind, sacrificing their adult judgment, experience, and ethical principles to greed. Like most companies built on pure speculation, JR’s empire eventually crumbles. Lost in the process, though, is more than overvalued stock; Gaddis insists that the real loss in a society so driven by the market is a common culture, a sense of civility, an educated mind—in short, an understanding of what it means to be human.