The financial crisis that began with the bankruptcy of the investment bank Lehman Brothers in 2008 and that subsequently spread worldwide signalled a crucial historical turning point, which some commentators have been led to call “a crisis of capitalism.” Observers have started investigating the socioeconomic mechanisms underlying the severest economic crisis since the 1929 crash and have drawn attention particularly to the practices of the financial sector, which have become increasingly the focus of academic research in the last few years.

The deregulations and the monetary policies implemented by governments in several countries since the late 1970s and particularly during the 1980s have, in fact, opened the doors to an extraordinary transformation: finance has become one of the most important triggers of social, economical and cultural change in contemporary society. All these transformations together are part of a social phenomenon often defined as financialization, a term which highlights how, in contemporary society, the logics of finance have become dominant paradigms. As a consequence of the financial crisis, analyses of cultural representations of finance are now increasingly becoming a growing field of academic research in literary and cultural studies. The latest book by Leigh Claire La Berge investigates how the aesthetics of financialized society are informed by the material practices of finance. The intersection between cultural forms and finance, La Berge claims, results in an aesthetic and narrative style which the author calls “financial form” (26).

The book draws attention to the financial fiction of the long 1980s, the decade that witnessed the expansion of the deregulated financial sector. The words of the protagonist of Jane Smiley's novel Good Faith (2001), set during the 1980s savings and loan (S & L) crisis, and ingeniously quoted by La Berge in the introduction of the book, perfectly summarize the zeitgeist of the 1980s, the temporal focus of the book: “It's like all of a sudden the whole world turned into money” (quoted at 3). Scandals and Abstraction investigates how a surplus of money generated by the 1980s deregulations of the financial sector “created new financial devices and logics as well as new channels for the production and contestation of literary meaning and narrative forms” (4). The book also asks what might be effective forms of representing the abstract reality of finance and, as previously mentioned, interrogates the role of financial culture in creating narratives and influencing the way in which daily-life economy is represented in cultural works.

The volume begins with the assumption that “we have reached the limit of representability” (15). Thus La Berge investigates how realist and postmodern narrative forms deal precisely with this limit. In doing so, the book also investigates how fictional works have borrowed from the language of financial print culture in order to overcome the intrinsic abstract nature of finance, and how this process has conversely determined a widespread financialization of the modes of narration. Investigating the creation of narratives from the intersections between the imperatives of finance and the logics of transaction is one of the main foci of the book and it is certainly an original and influential approach to the study of the relation between finance and culture. The book is a timely contribution to the debate around cultural representations of finance and it sheds light on the influence of the money economy on narrative forms.

The book is divided into four chapters, each focussing on a specific theme. The first chapter focusses on Don DeLillo's White Noise (1984) and its relation to a then newly introduced technology, the automated teller machine (ATM), which revolutionized the banking practices by de facto bringing financial transactions into people's daily lives. La Berge claims in this chapter that in White Noise the material practices of finance in its “instantiation” shape the postmodern narrative form of the novel (40). While the first chapter analyses the financialization of daily life and the relation between corporate branding and postmodern narrative forms, the second chapter deals with the relationship between finance and realist forms. La Berge begins with the suggestion that, after the 1980s, financial deregulation acquired the metonymic significance of “the economy” and developed a representational monopoly on economic knowledge. She then focusses on two iconic cultural representations of finance, Tom Wolfe's novel The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) and Oliver Stone's film Wall Street (1987), which, due also to their timely appearance, “claimed a narrative monopoly on representing an emergent financial era” (74). Chapter 3 focusses on Bret Easton Ellis's 1991 novel American Psycho, which La Berge considers the seminal “financial text as such” (113), as it is “a patchwork of what might be categorized as capitalist realist, postmodern, and autobiographical styles of financial representation” (115). The chapter tellingly draws attention to the financial print culture of the 1980s and to a series of financiers' biographies in which the use of language of violence became a metaphor to describe the practices of investment banking. Expressions such as “the killings,” “hostile takeover” and “takeover defences” largely found in financial print culture and financiers' biographies are “collected and emplotted in American Psycho” (124). The chapter is at its best in the discussion of the “literalization of metaphorical language” (138), in which the author contextualizes her discourse within the analyses of the relation between personal banking and violence in White Noise, The Bonfire of the Vanities and Ellis's novel.

The final chapter of the book deals with the representation of the savings and loan crisis – the failure of thousand of S & L associations in the US between the 1980s and the 1990s triggered by, among many reasons, financial deregulation and reforms of tax legislation. La Berge argues that “the S & L Crisis might serve as an allegory for the development of academic understanding of financialization in literary studies” (152). The author, in fact, affirms that the S & L crisis is indeed the story of the emergence of financialization, and the subsequent emergence of “critical tropes used to understand neoliberalism” (153), and their translation to the cultural sphere. In other words, according to the author the dematerialization of money coincided in cultural terms with the “spatialization of narrative, and an aesthetics of ephemera, pastiche, and fragmentation” (153). The final section of the chapter discusses Smiley's novel Good Faith, which La Berge defines as an allegory of the S & L crisis, in terms of its response to the complexity of representing financial abstraction.”

Scandals and Abstraction, with its conflation of Marxism and post-structuralism, is a theoretically sophisticated work, and a seminal contribution to scholarly discussions of financialization and its effects on literature and culture. It is a book which, focussing on the time of emergence of deregulated finance, illustrates how finance has, since the 1980s, invaded the spaces of daily life and triggered a shift in cultural representation of the economy, influencing also the ways in which everyday existence is narrated.