Chapter 5 - Fully Reflecting

Summary

This chapter devotes extended attention to two novels from either end of the “efficient market era” – Don DeLillo’s Players (1977) and Hari Kunzru’s Gods Without Men (2011) – that model their narrative forms on the information-crunching prowess of the financial markets’ price mechanisms, only to leave absences in the textual fabric that defy a totalitarian logic of epistemological capture. The juxtaposition of these two novels highlights how changing technological instantiations of efficient market theory have elicited shifting formal responses, and underscores both why the ideology of the efficient market has retained a hold over the imaginations of novelists, and why that hold is subject to increasing self-critique. The chapter argues, moreover, that Kunzru overtly presents his novel’s lack of conclusiveness as opposed not only to the market epistemology of contemporary finance, but also to the norms of the literary marketplace, with its own preference for narrative closure and transparency.