I just read the Wikipedia page on The Grapes of Wrath, and Steinbeck’s reason for writing it was “I want to put a tag of shame on the greedy bastards who are responsible for this”.
The recent financial collapse, which caused the housing crisis, was caused by the same “greedy bastards”. Will it result in a new The Grapes of Wrath, or has shame lost it’s power?
I think SHAME has lost it’s power.
I need to correct myself. I said “…the same greedy bastards”. What I meant was “…the same sort of greedy bastards”. These are the sons, grandsons and great-grandsons of the greedy bastards. Bastards squared, or cubed.
I don’t really see it getting the same attention because the problems are on different scales. A whole extended family who lost their family farm lost everything they owned, plus the ability to make money. A person or small nuclear family who loses a home nowadays still has the ability to work outside the home and move (either somewhere cheaper, or in with relatives/friends).
Besides, a modern book about someone who becomes unemployed and defaults on their home loan would be REALLY boring.
I think we will see some interesting literature out of this.
To some extent Tom Wolfe’s A Man in Full deals with some of hte current crisis - even though it was published in 1998!
And Po Bronson’s Bombardier’s covered the traders shenanigans in 1995.
“I bought a million dollar house with an interest only loan because I thought prices would always go up and I could find a sucker to flip it to in two years but now I’m underwater” is not the stuff of great literature.
This recession hurts many people for real. All of them do. But it’s like a splinter compared to prostate cancer if you look at the Great Depression. You can’t whine in a world where iPhones are supposed to be important.
There are real injustices in the world, which is why most of meaningful protest literature is coming from foreign authors. (Foreign to the U.S., of course.) American authors can write serious books today, but they could at any time because there is always oppression and injustice no matter what the economy is doing. But there is nothing, and I mean nothing, in the U.S. right now that is within orders of magnitude of what everyday life was for most people during the Depression. You can’t pretend otherwise.
Give it a few more years…
Steinbeck was writing within a petty commonly shared perception that God existed and was predominantly Judaeo-Christian, and that the people were the government and the government loved the people and would do all it could to help them. Reality has rendered both insupportable, and there aren’t currently any such fundamental suppositions in the zeitgeist. There’ll probably be some genre classics, but nothing with the wide appeal that Wrath had.
It would have to be written in Spanish.
The Great Depression really effected all classes and it was the first one to every really do this. I can see even as bad as this past recession was one thing I noticed is people who kept their jobs, the ones I know anyway, weren’t at all effected by it.
But in the Great Depression, well I guess Mr Howell said it best.
Professor) What did Mr Howell do during the Depression
Lovey) The Depression? Oh yes, that’s when Thurston lost most of his money and became only a millionaire.
The point being even the richest of the rich were effected, but this past recession as bad as it was, still had lots of people who did just fine riding it out