Publishers have yet to explore fully the consequences of a hobbled economy, but Segura spies a trend in the making. “By next spring, publishing will have fully caught up,” he predicted. “And by summer, you’re going to see a flood of new fiction dealing specifically with the big meltdown.”
Many months ago, when Jill Kargman conceived The Ex-Mrs Hedgefund (Dutton), the recession had yet to take its ruinous toll. Published in the spring, the book is set against a backdrop described by its heroine as “a bacchanal of the rich and obnoxious, a Falstaffian brew of hedonism and material excess.” Kargman’s characters, the wives of New York’s hedge-fund elite, are indeed perched on the edge of a volcano, prancing oblivious, on their Vivier heels.
Kargman herself is a stranger to high finance, but it didn’t take a Wharton degree to alert her that disaster loomed. Her tale was inspired by a birthday party for the child of an acquaintance. “They had sherpas carry in the child in a Cleopatra tent,” she recalled. “It was so over the top.”
She told her husband: “This is crazy. Something’s got to give.”
Her narrative follows the arc of denial, anger, bargaining and depression that has come to characterize the new recession lit. Holly Talbott, her morally ambivalent heroine, more a J. Crew than a J. Mendel sort, feels a gnawing disenchantment with her pampered milieu, which turns to shock and rue when her ex-husband, about to remarry, cuts off her credit at Clyde’s, the upscale Madison Avenue chemist. With “the spigot turned off,” she learns to fend for herself, picking up the threads of a career built on her first love, rock ’n’ roll.
“One of the big motifs in these books is a sort of empowerment,” Segura said. “Swathed in Gucci, Prada and what not, their protagonists realign their priorities and realize, ‘Oh, I don’t need that Givenchy gown. I can look great in Eileen Fisher, too.’”
They can also do without that banker in the Brioni suit. Directly or obliquely, most of these books take a feminist stance. “The woman doesn’t always end up with the guy at the end, but she ends up with a better sense of self,” said Liate Stehlik, the senior vice president and publisher at Avon, which released Hedge Fund Wives. Recovering from divorce, its heroine pulls up her socks and embarks on an indie career in the world of private banking.
Framed as cautionary tales, these books introduce female characters compelled to “face facts, raise funds and watch out for themselves,” said Elizabeth Beier, who edited The Summer Kitchen. “They’re not just vicariously experiencing other women’s getting and spending,” she said. “They are taking charge of their own identities; they are actually doing something, and that always makes more involving fiction.”
Readers appear to be responding. Based on letters and comments on author Web sites, many identify with the novel’s cosseted heroine, Nora, who learns with a jolt, Beier said, that “she actually has to make money to feed her kids and figure out how they’re going to be educated in a public school system.” Readers, Beier added, “feel that richer connection you have with a character who is more like you.”
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