The American novel vs. Cuban

Partly because of my political leanings and partly because of my penchant for watching prominent figures fall from grace in the public sphere, I cannot stop myself from reading every update regarding IU alumnus Mark Cuban’s battle with insider trading charges.

For those of you who haven’t been reading, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks and co-owner of 2929 Entertainment and HDNet is facing civil charges for selling his entire 6.3 percent ownership of Mamma.com Inc. hours before the company’s stock crashed in 2004. The claim has already caused some, such as Chicago-based attorney Phillip Stern, to insist that it will hinder his bid to purchase the Chicago Cubs. But more importantly to us, Cuban has set the stage for a very powerful American drama with a very canonical narrative – Wall Street goes down.

I must confess that my interest in the story also has a lot to do with reading Tom Wolfe’s 1987 novel, “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” in which a Wall Street bond trader gets involved in a hit-and-run car accident that fuels itself into the racial and sociopolitical trial of the century. Like Cuban, the protagonist Sherman McCoy rests in the highest tier of the economy during a period of huge economic disparity between the classes.

Among the other dynamic factors of the novel is the vast trunk of characters representing the social stratosphere at the time and an analytical commentary on the times themselves. In short, it is that highly mastered concept of the novel that has been lost from contemporary America and is in great need of return.

In American literature, the novel plays the crucial role of examining our every step as a culture. Mark Twain used it in “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” to examine the social discord and ethnocentricity that ravaged the Gilded Age. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” criticized the excess of the 1920s as fleeting, only to see the stock market crash at the end of the decade. J. D. Salinger called out for the abused, silent youth of the post-World War II economic boom.

Whenever a period of prosperity has blinded the people of America from seeing massive faults in the system, novelists have been there, painting a picture of our social landscape and, ultimately, affecting it for the better.

One could hardly refute that in the days of mass globalization, Sarah Palin and the extreme “hemorrhaging of wealth” (as Wolfe called it in the ’80s) amid a looming economic threat, the great American novel needs to return to its role as the narrative of our people.

Whatever your beliefs, it is apparent that our discord is so strong with one another that something deeper must be analyzed in our times, something only the great writers of our American tradition seem to understand. Perhaps in the next great American novel, a Mark Cuban figure could stand in the center as a picture of the many questions of our times.