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I always remember how a beloved college professor of mine responded when I told him the news that I'd gotten a fellowship to a Ph.D. program in English. "Well," he said, "at least you'll be able to read “Finnegans Wake” in the unemployment line."

At the time, I laughed along. I, too, believed literature would be enough of a consolation were I ever to find myself jobless and broke. But no more. The passing years and the present economic crisis make “Finnegans Wake” seem like cold comfort.

The unnamed narrator and main character of Lynn Steger Strong's immersive new novel, bluntly titled “Want,” is only in her early 30s, but she already knows what it took me a while to learn: that without bread, you can't appreciate roses.

Married, with two little girls, and living with her family in a cramped seventh-floor walk-up apartment in Brooklyn, she teaches at a charter high school in Manhattan where she's one of the few white teachers. It's a dispiriting place where the instruction is, as she says, "test-prep focused." One night a week, she also teaches literature at a prestigious university uptown, as an adjunct. It's a chance for the narrator to keep a toehold in the world where she thought she'd have a career.

In the present time of “Want,” the narrator and her husband — a former finance guy turned artisanal woodworker — are filing for bankruptcy. Here's our narrator recalling the series of unfortunate everyday events that got them to this place:

“Want” is so sharp about economic fragility and just how close to the edge people are — even with the seeming safeguard of middle-class jobs and good educations. The narrator's voice is the great draw here: It's tough, smart, semi-reliable, low-level angry. We're mostly cooped up in her head throughout much of the novel, which is a fine and rich place to be, since the outside world isn't all that compelling.

Day to day, the narrator rises at dawn to go for a long, pounding run to quell her anxiety, then showers, dresses, takes the subway to work and teaches. Often, after her classes are over, she slips out before the school day officially ends so that she can have a soothing hour alone in a cafe or bar, reading a novel by one of those lesser-known female writers — Anita Brookner, 

Strong is not writing about the working poor; nor are her characters homeless or starving. Her narrator isn't asking for pity — the novel wouldn't work if she were. Instead, this is a story about mundane middle-class precariousness, about people who work a lot and owe even more. And it's a story about wanting, always wanting, something else.

Toward the end of the novel, the narrator asks her husband, "What do you want, though?" And her husband, the dreamer who left Lehman Brothers a decade ago to make furniture, responds: "To pay our rent. ... To take care of our kids." Once upon a time, he would've assumed those modest wants didn't even need to be articulated. Probably many people these days feel the same way. 

Arts and Culture

The Thread® - Books and Literary News

The Thread

Maureen Corrigan

Author

The family at the center of Lynn Steger Strong's novel is on the brink of bankruptcy. “Want” is a portrait of how close to the edge people are — despite the seeming safeguard of middle-class jobs.

'Want' captures the precariousness of America's middle class

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