Union Atlantic by Adam Haslett (Tuskar Rock, £12.99)
Credit crunch fiction is a genre that hasn’t quite taken off—unsurprisingly, perhaps, given the arcane nature of modern finance. In this impressive debut novel, Adam Haslett boldly imagines an earlier moment of banking instability. The year is 2002 and Doug Fanning, a navy veteran in his late thirties, is in charge of “Special Plans” at Union Atlantic, one of America’s leading banks. Doug’s success is based on pursuing quasi-legal strategies made possible by the deregulation of the financial sector: creating shadowy holding companies, exploiting dubiously obtained information, turning a blind eye to lax traders. But now these policies are attracting the attention of regulators and, to make matters worse, the eyesore of a mansion Doug built himself in rural Massachusetts has put him on a legal collision course with his neighbour.
Rendering the minutiae of banking comprehensible and gripping is no easy feat for a novelist. Haslett, an acclaimed short-story writer who spent seven years researching and writing Union Atlantic, pulls it off with aplomb, shedding light on under-explored corners of the financial system, such as the operations of the New York federal reserve. But the technical never overwhelms the emotional and Union Atlantic ends up being a moving story about the debilitating consequences of denial and regret.
This article originally appeared in the July 2010 edition of Prospect.
