New Sincerity by Adam Kelly

"crazy bullshit"

New Sincerity: American Fiction in the Neoliberal Age by Adam Kelly (an associate professor at Dublin) is about, in large part, the way the fiction of the New Sincerity (Wallace, Eggers, etc) was shaped by “neoliberalism”. The problem is that although he invokes the idea dozens of times, and in multiple ways, Adam Kelly doesn’t know what “neoliberalism” is. As Cass Sunstein says in On Liberalism, no-one does. It is a name invented and used by its enemies. Unsurprisingly, Kelly almost never quotes (or paraphrases) the neoliberal writers he identifies (Friedman, Becker, Hayek, Buchanan), but instead relies on mischaracterization by their opponents. When he does explain supposedly neoliberal ideas (as in Becker’s model of human capital), he gets it wrong. So wrong that one economist I showed that passage to called it “crazy bullshit.” These ideas are being expressed at the level of a newspaper editorial, and not a very good one at that.

Kelly explains the 2008 crisis with the work of no economists, but relies instead on a “Marxist geographer” and some anthropology. The idea that the 2008 crash happened because debts from the 1980s “fell due” is crackers. New Sincerity wouldn’t even come close to passing a reading by an economist. (Not a “neoliberal” economist, either.) It’s fine to talk about the “spiritual cost” of capitalism, but you really must do more than just say it like it is obvious. Smith deals with this point! (assuming I know what Kelly means… he doesn’t define terms)

The whole way in which “neoliberalism” is dealt with is just unbecoming of a scholarly book. This isn’t an editorial! When you are happy to unironically call the modern economy for paid writing “feudal” it is clear you are not really a serious scholarly user of language. At some point, Kelly ought to have demonstrated the idea that “normative neoliberalism” insists on an “economic view of everyday life” or even explained what that means. The idea that “inescapable and all-consuming self-interest” is an essential part of neoliberalism simply cannot be supported with reference to any thinkers, which is why Kelly doesn’t so support his claim. His audience, however, will be sympathetic enough to his politics to mean that such basic standards do not have to be met. I normally wouldn’t bother panning a book like this, but it is remarkable just how acceptable it is among a certain sort of literary scholar to represent this school of thought with such a glib and oily art.

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You can find more sympathetic reviews of New Sincerity here and here. If you want to know what a neoliberal is, start with Sam Bowman’s piece “I’m a Neoliberal. Maybe you are too.” (He’s trying to wear the term of abuse as a badge of pride.)