Why fiction is no longer interested in financial complexity

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Literature plus time is an unhappy combination for financial comprehension. The internet will furnish you with an inflation-adjusted measure of Mr Darcy’s wealth in Pride and Prejudice, but unless they wish to also develop a passing understanding of Regency land economics, most readers are better-served by simply understanding him as having “loadsamoney”. Far worse is when a reader is left grappling with the simultaneous effects of inflation, currency conversion, purchasing power parity and, heaven forbid, debt instruments.

Several hundred pages into Madame Bovary, I found myself tied up in promissory notes. Gustave Flaubert’s titular heroine borrows her way to financial ruin by repeatedly renewing such notes. Eventually her creditor, Monsieur Lheureux, pulls the plug and, operating at arm’s length via a debt buyer, engineers one of literature’s most deleterious defaults.

In one scene, as the ruthless businessman Monsieur Lheureux sets his trap — in part, by discounting the bills rather than having the borrower pay interest — Flaubert writes that Emma “grew rather confused in her calculations, and her ears tingled as if gold pieces, bursting from their bags, rang all round her on the floor”. I, a financial journalist, didn’t fare much better. I must admit that, keen to return to Norman trysts and lengthy descriptions of interior design, I gloss-read this simply as “money gonna go bad”.

Finance is more complicated than it has ever been, but time and mass communication have made the quotidian operations of personal finance easier. Unlike Emma Bovary, the modern homemaker is unlikely to get levered via personal contracts with their local dry-goods merchant. There are signs that fiction’s appetite for financial complexity has waned alongside this relative safety. Google’s awe-inspiring Ngram Viewer, which lets users search for the usage of words and phrases going back through centuries of books, reveals that mentions of the word “financial” in English fiction are the lowest in about 50 years, while more vague terms such as “loan”, “bonds” and “finance” have also slipped.

The shift may also reflect changing attitudes to finance. The Victorians were obsessed with financial speculation as a moral failing, a fixation that fed through to the era’s didactic literature, pockmarked with swindlers and scams such as the Anglo-Bengalee Disinterested Loan and Life Assurance Company, the Ponzi-like company described by Charles Dickens in Martin Chuzzlewit.

Could it be that contemporary readers feel indifferent? Topics such as someone’s creditworthiness or the status of their investments, which were fuel for the 19th-century’s novelists and its gossips, are now more likely to be entries in the database of some distant conglomerate. For most people now, engaging with the world of finance is as quotidian as brushing one’s teeth. Which isn’t to say that money isn’t important, only that it rarely gets discussed beyond a character’s need to pay the rent.

Hollywood is hardly better. The Big Short, a 2015 movie adaptation of Michael Lewis’s book of the same name about the 2008 financial crisis, famously deployed Margot Robbie, in a bathtub, to explain mortgage-backed bonds. To my eyes, Robbie is the exception that proves the rule: explaining a financial arrangement is now so alien in a drama that it requires breaking the fourth wall to an incredible degree. Even in other finance-focused movies and TV shows of recent years — 2013’s The Wolf of Wall Street; 2023’s Dumb Money; the ongoing BBC series Industry — very little time is spent on the technicalities.

There are, of course, exceptions, and some of them are honourable. Trust, Hernan Diaz’s 2022 novel, dwells upon the shared qualities of fiction and finance, while in Ned Beauman’s Venomous Lumpsucker, released the same year, the main character’s short trade misfires, to provide what Writing 101 classes would call the “inciting moment”. I recently enjoyed Margo’s Got Money Troubles, a 2023 novel by Rufi Thorpe about a young single mother turning to work on adult website OnlyFans after losing her job. It wasn’t financially complicated, exactly, but it explored freelance business economics and the influencer economy.

Still, I think we can do more, and better. When will we get the first literary treatment of someone getting margin called? And no, before you ask, The Merchant of Venice doesn’t count. Could there be a Jane Austen of Jane Street? For any novelist inspired to take up the cause, here are some freebie tips: a quest narrative about a disillusioned actuary setting out to discover whether her employer’s carbon-offsetting scheme is real; a claustrophobic romance in which a Stirt trader begins a virtual affair via Instant Bloomberg; almost anything involving exchange traded funds.

At the risk of preaching to the choir by writing this for the FT Weekend Magazine readership — many of whom, one would assume, are comfortable with both the bond prospectus and the bildungsroman — there is a huge narrative potential where financial complexity meets fiction. It’s a potential we seem to have forgotten.

Louis Ashworth is a reporter for FT Alphaville

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