Alison Shonkwiler's ambitious monograph, The Financial Imaginary, makes a valuable contribution to current critical debates on contemporary literary-economic culture. From the opening sentence, Shonkwiler asserts “that the growing abstraction of contemporary capitalism demands new imaginative conceptions of the real” (ix). Put another way, if the zeitgeist of the early 1990s was encapsulated by the Clinton campaign mantra “the economy, stupid,” Shonkwiler seeks to challenge its corollary assertion that the economy itself has grown to be stupefying. Countering claims that the economy (or, more specifically, finance) is unassailable and unintelligible, Shonkwiler reveals the ways in which fiction clashes with discourses of mystification that shroud global finance.

Shonkwiler approaches the problem of economic mystification on two interrelated fronts. The first seeks to reconceptualize the (im)materiality of finance by complicating her two opening terms: “abstraction” and “the real.” Financialization may involve “a reorientation toward the nonproductive” (xxvii) (and thus toward more abstract modes of value production that seemingly melt into air), but nevertheless this “abstraction … is not unreal … Quite the reverse, it is the reality of abstraction that allows finance capitalism to achieve its extensive reach and concrete effects” (xxv). This overlaps with the monograph's second challenge to economic mystification, which draws a key parallel between fiction and finance, namely that even in extreme abstraction, fictionality is as necessary to finance as to the novel. Representation is a process of creating value: a speculative value has to be projected and believed (or at least not too greatly disbelieved) before it can be cashed out; that is, made real. An imagination of value – financial or fictional – can only be gauged successful or not by whether it realizes some suspension of disbelief, on the part either of the market or of the reader (xxviii).

Literature, in other words, is a vital tool to better understanding the operation of finance. Shonkwiler terms the critique of this shared space of literary and financial representation the “financial imaginary”, “the formal project … of imaginatively grasping the historical and cultural processes by which the seeming realities of the economy are reconceived as phenomena of virtuality and representation” (ix). This act of “imaginatively grasping” is, however, never fully realized individually or literarily, but rather “the novel's efforts to keep pace [with finance capital] reveal their deeper, shared narrative logics” (xiii). As she later elaborates, “The novel recapitulates the representational logic of this imaginary but adds friction, slows it down, expands it, subjectivizes it, adds data and history. The novel aims to resituate finance's logic in its own formal terms” (xxv).

Thus the limitations on narrative to grapple with economic mystification (while perhaps transforming a social problem into a formal one) nonetheless reveal the qualified possibility for literature to engage financial logic, albeit without representing it as a “real” object.

Shonkwiler's analytical framework emphasizes “realism” as the mode that “offers the promise (however illusory) of a materialist critique” (xvi), even of a purportedly abstract reality. While this complements the overarching argument, the underlying binary between “postmodern and realist strategies to penetrate late capitalism's abstractions” (xi) seems slightly outmoded in the wake of autofiction, new sincerity, post-postmodernism and other critical categories that posit alternative representational possibilities for the real. That notwithstanding, Shonkwiler's measured approach to the resistant strategies of literary form (realist or otherwise) consistently demonstrates its strengths by offering incisive readings of nine texts, eight American and one Pakistani, that reveal the diverse contradictions of finance capital and affirm literature's role as an effective tool to do so.

The monograph's primary focus falls on American novels from around the 2000s that outline a financial history from Reagan to Recession, while also turning to “‘economic’ novelists” (1) of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This gives the argument a convincing additive quality, which builds and expands different modes of novelistic disruption to financial logic. For instance, analyses of William Dean Howells, Henry James and Theodore Dreiser illustrate how the categories of “financial individuality,” “financial character” and “economic virtue” (2) are complicated in the context of the boom of American finance during the previous fin de siècle. In the next chapter, Shonkwiler offers a standout reading of Jane Smiley's Good Faith (2003) that deftly illustrates the interrelation of Smiley's representation of character with the “‘Californianization’ of real estate speculation” (37) during the 1980s Savings and Loan crisis. Later readings of Richard Powers's Gain (1998) and Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis (2003) shift attention from these crises of character to problematics of form. Gain registers capitalism's desire for “the unity of the corporate epic” but “disturbs the overcoherences of capitalism's self-representation” (62). Likewise, as Powers problematizes the epic form, Shonkwiler outlines Cosmopolis’s complicating of the sublime, which relocates sublimity from individual consciousness to digital, financial networks in a novel where “third-person technique” functions as the protagonist's “unusually objectified form of first-person” (83). These linked readings dovetail into a wider critique of finance's sociocultural authority that smartly balances illustration of literary disruption to financial logic without positing an idealized cultural autonomy.

The monograph is at its very best where it extends its analysis of twentieth-century finance capital of Smiley, Powers and DeLillo and their engagement with property, the corporation and digital technologies. As such, the monograph's broader focus occasionally raises the question whether the argument might be better served by a more consolidated approach. It has the commendable ambition to cast its eye over the longue durée of finance but the leap from the Gilded Age to Reagan omits large swathes of economic history. Shonkwiler helpfully qualifies the historical parallel of her turn to the nineteenth century; but to understand “the financial imaginary” historically, rather than turning back to Howells, James and Dreiser, it might have been more profitable to mine recent decades and save diachronic work for a larger project. This would have allowed, for example, for an analysis of what Leigh Clare La Berge terms the “revanchist realism” of authors such as Tom Wolfe or Jonathan Franzen.Footnote ¹ Similarly, the final chapter slightly overreaches in its attempts to fully realize its global scope. Its readings of Teddy Wayne's Kapitoil (2010) and Mohsin Hamid's How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013) work to complete a trajectory that starts with James's New York rentier and builds towards DeLillo's “master of the universe” by considering “global relationalities as the inequities and blockages between first-world and third-world subject positions are intensified” (99). Unfortunately, the breadth of “third-world subject positions” struggles to be encapsulated by the analysis of one non-American author.

These are not, however, limitations of The Financial Imaginary. Rather, they are testament to its stimulating claims and the fertile groundwork that it lays for the ever-burgeoning field of cultural-economic criticism. Shonkwiler's incisive work on the contemporary US provides a springboard for analyses of diverse contexts ranging from the Wall Street Crash to today's Indian tech-bubble. In this respect, Shonkwiler has given us an indispensable point of reference and a powerful rationale for criticism that seeks to think both culturally and socially about finance both in today's United States and beyond.