The sleeve of Selling the Story announces Jonathan Paine as “an unusual literary scholar,” given his career as an investment banker, but these two roles combine productively in this insightful new study of Honoré de Balzac, Fedor Dostoevskii, and Emile Zola. Paine's investigation, as he acknowledges, can be viewed as part of the recent revival in economic approaches to literary criticism, such as those by Catherine Gallagher (2006) and Franco Moretti (2013). It is distinct, however, in adopting a multi-perspectival approach to economic criticism, discussing by turns the “value” of literary texts, in both the aesthetic and financial sense, the text as an object that the author is always trying to “sell” to the reader (both literally and metaphorically), as well as the various ways in which these texts might provide clues as to their own economic activity. One notable strength of Paine's method is that he directs particular attention towards the publishing context, a focus which “provides the tools to detect the pressures of artistic production at work on the author and…possible authorial responses in the text” (11).

Selling the Story tests its hypothesis regarding the novel “as an implicit commentary on the conditions of its own production” (35) through readings of Balzac's Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes (1835–1847), Dostoevskii's Brat΄ia Karamazovy (1881) and Zola's La Curée (1872) and L'Argent (1891). Chapter 1 argues that because of its extended period of composition, Splendeurs functions as an effective lens through which to view not only Balzac's career as a novelist but also the commercialization of the novel form more generally and its relationship to the development of the French press. Paine argues persuasively that Splendeurs is a “novel of the false prospectus [that] is itself a false prospectus, purporting to deliver value but in reality subverting its own claims” (43). He reads the Esther section productively as Balzac's specific attempt to emulate the success of Eugène Sue's Les Mystères de Paris (1842–43) and as his response to the feuilleton trend in all major newspapers of the time. Paine concludes that Splendeurs can be seen as “almost a secret diary of Balzac's struggle to come to terms with the commercialization of the publishing industry in the 1830s and 1840s” (96). Chapter 2 sees Paine contend that The Brothers Karamazov is emblematic of Dostoevskii's career-long struggle between treating the literary text as a “prospectus-style medium” (99) for imposing his own view of its value and his recognition of the need to write for a commercial market. Discussion here focusses on textual features that, Paine proposes, have economic effects, specifically iteration and genre. He characterizes Dostoevskii as a “speculative writer” (102) who experiments by repeatedly retelling stories from different perspectives in order to see how these various iterations might affect reader reception, a strategy that is a logical response, Paine argues, to a still-developing Russian readership. With regards to genre, Paine suggests that The Brothers Karamazov sees Dostoevskii test whether any one of confession, melodrama, parable, or hagiography can coexist with a commercially-viable work of fiction. The third and final chapter of Selling the Story turns its attention to two works by Zola, a writer whom Paine labels “as much businessman as novelist” (183), and who operated in a publishing world entirely different to that of Balzac, an environment where sensationalism sold but which censorship laws rendered unpredictable. Naturalism, Paine suggests, was an effective genre with which to mirror the popular public's taste for voyeurism and classification, to penetrate class barriers, and to reflect the sensationalism and excess that was so successful in contemporary journalism. La Curée and L'Argent are two works taken from either end of Zola's literary career but they serve to demonstrate, for Paine, how Zola's position throughout was “as much that of the chief executive of a publishing business as that of an author” (239).

Although Paine contends that his choice of these three authors ensures an applicability of his theory of narrative value “across time, geography and culture” (35), this claim is not entirely persuasive: the three novelists actually only operated in two different cultures, across an historical span of little more than sixty years. Future scholarship might investigate whether a broader range of writers, including perhaps a woman, can sustain the same argument about the literary responses to economic pressures. Although the failure to attribute Economies of Feeling (2017) correctly to Jillian Porter (not Cooper) is an unfortunate oversight, Selling the Story is, overall, an impressively written and presented work which showcases wide-ranging research, sensitive readings, and original insights.