Out of the last financial boom, in the wake of the GFC, come the novelists’ judgements. Often novelists can penetrate deeper than the analysts and historians. Adam Haslett’s Union Atlantic is a coruscating dig into the ascendancy of a fictional American bank of that name, told through the eyes of four intersecting characters: an emotionally void ex-GI running the bank, who builds a McMansion in an enclave of the inherited rich; a spirited, askew spinster teacher who challenges the banker’s construction; her brother, chairman of the Federal Reserve; and a callow teenager literally caught in the middle of the battle.
Haslett propels the narrative of Union Atlantic without an ounce of padding, piling on scene after magnificent scene set in downtown Boston or semi-rural Massachusetts. Each of the characters vibrates with life; the author accords each an equal seriousness and moral weight. The nuanced yet muscular style is one of the most compelling I’ve read this year. And somehow Ferris crowds into this regular-sized volume a panoply of modern thematic touchstones: the GFC, invasion of Iraq, the collapse under fraud of Barings and the Bush years.
America of the noughties under the novelistic microscope of a bold stylist. 4 stars.