Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth by Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood is one of those authors I vaguely respect and follow. I’ve read one or two of her novels, and hear lovely things about her, so she’s categorized in my head as a smart, interesting lady. Thus, when I saw her newest book, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth while on lunch break from jury selection, I picked it up. She’s a writer and a feminist, I thought; surely her literary approach to the credit crisis can help me make sense of it and expand my ways of thinking about it.
Unfortunately, I’m about to quit less than seventy pages in. To give her the full benefit of the doubt, the chapters were originally written as part of a radio forum and presented orally; that format requires a different level and complexity of thought. I think I might find this book tolerable if I were to hear it on the radio while half-awake or driving or cleaning house, which are the things I usually do while listening to public radio.
Written, though, it falls far short of my expectations. It has a number of small flaws–and does a number of things well–but its central fallacy is a surprisingly simple one: it approaches the touchy subject of debt with a foregone conclusion. Atwood’s starting point is this: debt is inherently bad. The only questions remaining are how really awful it is and why we’re stuck in it anyways, though as far as I can see she only pays this latter question some small lip service (but I probably won’t finish, so let me know if she does better later in the book). Proving that debt is evil, for Atwood, mostly means using anecdotes to draw parallels between debt and sin, debt and death, and so forth. She draws these parallels by recounting stories or myths, abstracting them into vague generalities, then piously pointing at the obvious (because general) correlation. This quickly gets boring, and much (though not all) of the humor is kind of condescending and un-funny, hence my probable abandonment of this particular reading project.
Instead, I’d like to point out (entirely for my own amusement) how this might have been a good book, a challenging book, even an important book. Atwood could have refused to accept the cultural mystification of debt as big-scary-ebeeel and gone back to more fundamental questions: What function does debt serve in society? What is “good” or “acceptable” debt, and what is “bad” debt? Who decides the terms of debts? What shifts have gotten us to where we are now in our credit crisis and our surplus of national (and social) debts? Refusing to accept that debt is inherently bad could be productive; it could offer an opportunity to think about what makes communities work. Debt creates and sustains relationships, determines and reinforces hierarchy, and builds reputations and wealth. When does it begin to break down society instead of building it? When does it become so impersonal that it stops functioning? Might our current crisis be the result not of our fondness for debt, but of our terror of being indebted–that is, aren’t we all in debt to credit card companies and payday loans and pawnshops because our communities no longer offer the help we need to make it through? Maybe good debt could have saved us from all this bad anti-social debt.
But Atwood cheats herself out of the possibility of exploring any of these ideas by starting off with the worn conflation of crime and debt. Too bad, because there is plenty to be done here. Given such rich material to tend her ideas in, she only bothered with a few pious tufts of grass. It’s a shame.
