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Martha McPhee’s fourth novel is narrated by India Palmer, a 38-year old Manhattan-based novelist with four critically respected mid-list books to her credit and a fifth one nearing release. Two children, a satisfying marriage to an artist, a university teaching job. But each moment points only to the need and desire for money. It is 2003, the height of the real estate boom and over-leveraged borrowing. India says:

“We were approaching forty, Theodor and I, we had our two girls, but we lived like a couple just starting out – with the expectation that circumstances would change, that with the growth of our careers we would trade up from our apartment to something a little more grown-up, replace the hand-me-down furniture,. Stuff hauled in off the street. All the pretension, all the hiding and the juggling, couldn’t keep that reality from me as we faced all that was – or wasn’t – ours. With each novel, with each impending publication, I longed for our circumstances to change. However much I’d built my life around my wife, I’d also come to hope that my next book would be the winning ticket in the literary lottery where art met commerce and bought you a fancy new coat for your trouble.”

India is intelligent, perceptive, artistic – but also the prototypical American: she wants things she can’t afford, oppressed by “the weight, the slow, steady pressure, crushing with humiliating might” of pretending to meet expenses. While visiting friends Emma and Will Chapman at a rented seaside house in Maine, India meets Win Johns, a hyperconfident bond trading genius who claims he can turn her into a trader. She takes the dare and the plot unfolds.

Once, fictional women like Carrie Meeber came to the city in search of a better life only to be ruined by blandishments and labor. But India Palmer controls her own story with the charged resolve of a competitive trader. She recruits our complicity within the first few pages – through an authentic respect and affection for her own and others’ fallibility and corruptibility, addressing her audience with an intuitive grasp of prevailing attitudes, trends and issues. McPhee devotes the first half of Dear Money to establishing India’s point of view, giving us in the process a convincing portrait of a conflicted literary life.

Although the leap from novelist to Wall Street it-girl may seem to stretch credulity, McPhee achieves it fluently by letting India cultivate our respect. Listening to her describe her job interview, I recalled the strangeness of presenting my double-breasted-suited academic self to an impatient hiring manager some 34 years ago. I, too, wanted to play a role in the marketplace. In the world of mortgage-backed securities, India hears “a story line on an Olympian scale. This was imagination at work, imagination with consequences – nothing less.” I felt the same way about the rise of the high-tech computer business, a cultural revolution at hand. ”Theirs was the Apollonian quest for the purest signal, to filter out the noise and its associated moral quandaries and grasp from all the distracting bits that I once used in my daily life – to jettison all that, and to seizes the signal, the trend, the very flow of history itself.”

But before her story finds her at a trading desk, India wants us to acknowledge her depth, to size her up as a person with undiminished sensitivity to human situations. In an early scene after Win arrives in Maine, India’s daughters Gwen and Ruby talk with Emma’s daughter Elisabeth:

“‘What kind of name is Win?’ Gwen asked in that direct way of hers, her hard intelligent eyes fixed on Elisabeth as if to make her prove something. Somehow Gwen had skipped naiveté and gone straight to knowledge and logic. Ruby stood by me now, her arms hanging limply, trying to read her sister to ascertain if Win was a positive thing, or if Win might steal something from their lovely afternoon.
‘It’s Win’s kind of name,’ Elisabeth answered, protectively. Hers was clearly a world in which everything was good and safe and bountiful, and the light that emanated from her eyes was a protected one. Gwen’s question challenged something that was beyond Elisabeth’s conscious ability to comprehend, but instinctively she got it. She held Gwen with her big eyes, which softly said, Leave my world alone.”

McPhee deftly employs these domestic scenes to color in India’s world – where the children reflect their parents’ ability to create ease and comfort. Having been introduced to Win’s bluff directness and royal paunch, we, too, are asking if he is a positive thing, even as India describes her spring-loaded reaction to him.

Earlier this year, John Lanchester, the author of an account of the financial crisis, wrote in The Telegraph that fiction has failed as a capable medium for describing the work world:

“This regrettable lapse in the worldliness of the novel is based, I think, on the fact that so much modern work is so complicated. Television can give us a cartoon version of a barrister’s work, or a forensic scientist’s work, or a doctor’s work; for a fuller and more real version, the writer would have to do a huge amount of explanation of the complex realities of their different working lives. But you can’t explain in fiction, not like that and not at the necessary length … It’s fine in small doses, as a dollop of explanation before the main course of drama, but the complexity of modern working lives is too much for it. That, more than anything else, is the reason why the novel has drifted away from whole areas of our everyday working lives.”

But in the second half of Dear Money, McPhee tests Lanchester’s complaint, giving India the latitude to explain her business in some depth, and to indicate the scope of the mortgage-backed securities (MBS) global market. We see how the trading floor is organized, how trades are executed, how traders think and behave. The packaging and selling of household debt, a mini-history of mortgages in America – India lays it out clearly. Not surprisingly, this is the riskiest part of the novel for McPhee, and Dear Money never fully regains its psychological momentum once India’s story moves from want to having. “I discovered that everything I’d ever thought about the world of finance was of a fantastically low order of caricature,” she says after joining the trading firm. But McPhee has to work hard here to keep India interesting while she revels in out-performing her more experienced peers. Still, there are compensations such as the side-stories of India’s novelist friend Lily who hits the literary jackpot, and the potentially dicey financial situation of Will and Emma who take out an adjustable rate mortgage to pay for the Maine house when it goes up for sale.

When McPhee was writing Dear Money in 2006-07, the MBS bubble hadn’t yet burst. The novel concludes just as Win shifts gears and begins to short the market, betting on a fall – and as Cavelli, India’s influential publisher, makes her an offer for a book on her Wall Street experiences. In response, she says:

“For what became clear right then, falling into sharp focus, for an instant crystalline, was that I had been so willing to throw it all away because the writing had stopped belonging to me. Rather, for me it had come to belong to the opinion of others and mysterious market forces and the power and influence of money, money as the great indicator of everyone’s worth. I could not work so hard at writing when I could no longer allow it to belong to me.”

Right to the end, McPhee makes it hard to reject India’s argument and actions – even as it becomes increasingly difficult to identify with them. We know, as she doesn’t, how much damage will be caused by the market collapse. But in the story’s moment, India betrays no ill effects (no buyer’s remorse) from forswearing her writing life. She remains, however, a terrific storyteller, completely credible. Dear Money, a novel deflating the literary life, deserves to be Martha McPhee’s most widely read novel.

 

[Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on June 3, 2010. 346 pages, $25.00 hardcover]