Capitalism: A Novel

It's the sea we swim in, but as fishes we have little of great depth to say about capitalism. Movies and TV seem more inquisitive about the corporate world, starting with Greed (yes, based on the Frank Norris novel) and Citizen Kane and stretching to Wall Street, Billions and Succession.

Of course, there's Edith Wharton to remind us of greed and human cruelty in the Gilded Age, and Upton Sinclair's The Jungle and Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby to remind us of the depravities of wealth in the early part of the 20th Century.

And those of you who’ve been forced to grind for a living, especially writers, must read George Gissing’s great novel about the publishing racket, set in Victorian London, New Grub Street.

Now we have Hernan Diaz's new novel, Trust, which I've just finished reading. Told from various perspectives, the story revolves around financier Andrew Bevel, a man so wealthy and powerful he is said to have singlehandedly caused (and profited from) the Crash of '29 -- and his artistic wife Mildred, the true genius behind his success.

Trust is a fine novel. I particularly enjoyed the section about Bevel's private secretary, Ida Partenza, the young daughter of an Italian anarchist whom he hires to ghostwrite his memoir. Writing the reminiscences of a rich and powerful person like Bevel is all about "aligning" reality, Ida discovers. "His fortune bent reality around it," she writes.

But Trust, which is set in the 1920s and '30s, is a historical novel. Is there any great work of fiction about the age of Amazon, Facebook, and Tesla? Dave Eggers's The Circle -- a dystopian look at a Silicon Valley behemoth like Google -- was chillingly funny. But there must be others too.

Please suggest some good novels about modern capitalism.

Novelist Hernan Diaz