Chronicle of a boom untold
Hunting for the great dot-com novel

By Helena Echlin

WHEN F. Scott Fitzgerald's fourth novel, Tender Is the Night, was published in 1934, the author waited anxiously for news of sales figures. He was relying on the book to solve his financial problems. He had always had extravagant habits, and now he found himself footing the bills for Zelda's sojourns in mental institutions. But the book's reception was lukewarm. Its subject – expatriate life in the 1920s – was no longer fashionable. There were other reasons for the disappointing sales, but the chief problem was that the Great Depression had taken away readers' appetites for tales of flappers and tycoons. Novelist John O'Hara wrote, "The book came out at precisely the wrong time in national history. No matter how good it was, it was about the Bad people, the well fed, well housed, well educated, well born – the villains of the depression." When an era of prosperity comes to an abrupt end, people naturally don't want to read novels about it. It's too dispiriting. And just as few wanted to read about the 1920s in the 1930s, so these days few want to read about the late 1990s.

So far, actually, there haven't been many opportunities to do so. Very few novelists have tackled the dot-com-obsessed late '90s, and none have taken the Bay Area as their setting. Why doesn't this busted boom have any chroniclers? After all, plenty of writers worked in dot-coms and had a chance to scrutinize the zeitgeist at first hand. And with so many laid off in the last couple of years, people have had the time to write novels. So where are the stories set in SoMa warehouses turned into impromptu offices? Where are the heroes struggling to launch start-ups and the villains withholding venture capital? Why do we have The Great Gatsby but no The Great Gates? Critic Edmund Wilson, in his study of California novelists, Boys in the Back Room (1941), wrote, "Contemporary California has ... been described by our novelists at least as extensively as any other part of the country." This is no longer true.

But we need a novel that captures that lost era. We need a novel to show future generations what it was really like to be alive then, in a way that only a novel can do. We need it for the same reason we need novels in general: to analyze and assess our age, to make us take stock. Wilson opines, "It is the function of the literary artist to struggle with new phases of experience and to try to give them beauty and sense." Someone ought to struggle with the dot-com boom and give it beauty and sense – a daunting task, admittedly.

Although our recent boom has inspired few novels, other booms have. The effect of prosperity on personality has always attracted novelists. Wealth, or the expectation of it, seems to bring out the extremes of human nature, from base greed to lofty idealism. Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner's Gilded Age (1873) portrays a time when crooked land speculators and unscrupulous bankers preyed on a nation's peacetime hopefulness. Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now (1875) depicts an age in which ruthless speculators cheat credulous aristocrats out of their money with get-rich-quick schemes. The novels and stories of Fitzgerald acquaint us with the languorous rich of the Jazz Age, and we have Tom Wolfe, Jay McInerney, and Brett Easton Ellis to show us the excesses of the 1980s. Writers of boom novels show us that the state of the economy is intimately entangled with the state of the heart, since how much money you have, or think you can get, affects the way you behave and all your relationships. In short, booms beg to be written about.

Jonathan Raban's Waxwings (2003) is set in the late 1990s and has the boom as its backdrop, but it takes place in Seattle. Po Bronson's The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest (1997) is perhaps the closest thing we have to a dot-com novel. It's set in the terror-free days of stock options and low unemployment, although in a Silicon Valley research lab rather than an Internet company. Its hero, Andy Caspar, is a bright young engineer whose attempts to design a $300 computer are thwarted by older men – in particular Francis Benoit, a master chip designer, who has set Andy up on the project for his own selfish motives. The First $20 Million presents a wonderful gallery of '90s types: youthful idealists, lonely nerds, greedy media, and scheming managers. Its subtitle is A Silicon Valley Novel. But why is it the only one?

Perhaps writers shy from Silicon Valley because business and technology seem to be unliterary subjects. This is the most recent version of a problem California writers have always faced: the challenge of new material. In an essay published in the Winter 1999-2000 issue of the Ruminator Review, Sonoma poet Dana Gioia puts it thusly: "There is no use listening for a nightingale among the scrub oaks and chaparral.... We must describe a reality that has never been captured in English." California writers have no precedents to draw on in the literary traditions of England and New England, Gioia argues; they must forge a new way of writing. This is true, of course, for every worthwhile writer, but perhaps especially so for California writers. Their task now is to discover the poetic in the IPO.

Writing about something that has never been written about is difficult but not impossible. Perhaps the problem is that we don't want to write. One school of thought holds that while the East Coast breeds literati, the West Coast harbors only lotus-eaters.

In Wilson's view, living here is literary suicide: "It is a good deal too easy to be a nihilist on the coast at Carmel." In other words, life is too laid-back, and it is too tempting for a novelist to forsake the desk for the poolside.

Wilson finds the climate boring and the landscape uninspiring. In his view, the Pacific is "purposeless" (unlike the superior, "moody" Atlantic). Worse yet, something indefinable about California topography – perhaps the wide-open space – makes everything that happens in California seem unimportant. "The purposes and passion of humanity," Wilson complains, "have the appearance of playing their roles in a great open-air amphitheater which lacks not only acoustics to heighten and clarify the speeches but even an attentive audience at whom they may be directed." Since Wilson chooses simile over explanation, it is unclear exactly why the landscape should turn human experience here into the theater of the absurd. As he continues to describe the inadequacies of the West Coast, he becomes rhapsodic, speaking of "golden and boundless sunlight" and "cloud dramas that fade away to sea." It becomes apparent what his problem is: he's jealous.

Gioia rightly dismisses the weather argument (after all, the sunny Mediterranean gave us Homer, Virgil, and Dante) but is a little more precise about the problem with the landscape: it's too distracting. According to him, Californians, in thrall to the outdoors, miss something essential to producing good literature: "Western writers gain privacy but lose the considerable intellectual energy of social interaction." Californian literary life, in Gioia's view, is exemplified by "writers like Wallace Stegner or Jeffers, true intellectuals but also naturalists and outdoorsmen." Apparently, in California, writers prefer camping to conversation, skiing to salons. Gioia claims that, in contrast, "there are single city blocks in Manhattan than generate more national literary opinion than all of Northern California."

There are no statistics available on what percentage of California's population become writers. But it's possible to count journals, readings, independent bookstores, and creative writing programs. If literary activity is any measure of a state's literariness, then California is doing fine, with San Francisco's Grotto; with the journals The Believer, Zoetrope, Threepenny Review, and Zyzzyva; with the Stanford Creative Writing Program and its Stegner fellowships – to name just a few examples. Local writers are not, as Gioia suggests, reclusive nature lovers. Of the three writers recently named by the San Francisco Chronicle as the center of our local literary universe – Daniel Handler, Dave Eggers, and Michael Chabon – it's hard to imagine any choosing a camping trip over a book party.

California is as literary a state as any, and its writers most likely are producing dot-com novels. The reason for the dot-lit dearth may be that East Coast publishers don't want to buy them. Local novelist Noah Hawley was unable to sell his second novel, only tangentially about the boom, because no matter how many times he revised it, editors found his characters unsympathetic. A dot-com seems an obvious source of sudden wealth, but the newly minted millionaire of Dave Eggers's latest novel, You Shall Know Our Velocity, derives his fortune from the use of his image in a lightbulb ad. Eggers was quite likely savvy enough to realize that associating his hero with the boom would not endear him to the reader.

But while the East Coast may not be more essentially literary than California, it does have more literary industry. The major publishing houses – in fact, most publishing houses – are in New York, as are most literary agents. The East Coast boasts of more literary journals and administers more awards. The reviews that shape national opinion are those of East Coast publications. Even though a writer can handle business matters over e-mail and telephone, there's no substitute for face-to-face interaction. As a result, it's easier to establish and cultivate a literary reputation from the East Coast. (The three members of the "red-hot center" of our "literary solar system" all established their careers on the East Coast before moving, or returning, here.)

The gap between East Coast publishers and West Coast novelists is psychological as well as geographic. There's a lack of shared experience. The publishing industry centers on the East Coast, but the dot-com boom centered on the West Coast. While the heady mood of the boom touched the whole country, its main events took place here. It may be that the dot-com industry unfolded so far away from New York that it seemed to New Yorkers as nebulous and evanescent as Wilson's "cloud dramas that fade away to sea." Wilson remarked, "All visitors from the East know the strange spell of unreality which seems to make human experience on the Coast ... hollow." In Boys he articulates a viewpoint many East Coasters hold (unconsciously or sometimes openly): life in California is insubstantial, and what happens here doesn't really matter. California is eccentric, ancillary – not part of the real America.

It seems common sense that readers in a recession will shun novels about the rich. But this isn't always the case. Novels of the 1980s boom flew off the shelves after the decade was over. American Psycho, that bloody tale of designer lifestyles and depravity, was published in 1990, just in time for the Bush recession. The Bonfire of the Vanities, the best-selling story of a financier's fall from grace, reached bookstores just a week before the Wall Street crash of October 1987. Brightness Falls, the critically acclaimed story of the attempted takeover of a publishing house set in the months before the crash, wasn't published until 1992. These books didn't succeed simply because these authors had already established their reputations; so had Fitzgerald. The crash of 1987 didn't have the same effect on our literary taste as the end of the Jazz Age and the Internet era. Why not?

Sometimes a downturn doesn't crush people's hopes but merely dents them. Arguably, this was the case in the late '80s. Although the crash ushered in a recession, people still nurtured the same ambitions, and they still harbored get-rich-quick dreams. They still wanted to read about the wealthy and successful – about people like Sherman McCoy and Patrick Bateman. At other times, as in 1929 and 2001, the end of an era also means the end of a sensibility. In such cases, people are reluctant to look back. Obviously, the Internet craze wasn't just about money but about a value system that prized risk, youth, and entrepreneurship. Sept. 11, 2001, and war abruptly ended that phase in our history. Now applications for the Peace Corps have risen and so have memberships in life-coaching organizations. People who were Internet lawyers at the turn of the century have now become yoga teachers. A downturn is far more difficult to deal with when what you have lost is not just money but a set of ideals, however naive.

The '90s have often been compared to the '20s. Both decades saw the glorification of youth, investment in new technology, and stock-market speculation. Our mood today may echo that of the '30s, at least in this: then, as now, people shrank from retrospection. In a postmortem, "Echoes of the Jazz Age," published in the November 1931 issue of Scribner's Magazine, Fitzgerald wrote, "It is the custom now to look back on our selves of the boom days with a disapproval that approaches horror." While our disapproval may not approach horror, it certainly approaches embarrassment.

But Fitzgerald argues the case for looking back. In dismissing the old days, people tend to forget what was good about them. "There were so many good things," he writes. "These eyes have been hallowed by watching a man order champagne for his two thousand guests, by listening while a woman ordered a whole staircase from the greatest sculptor in the world, by seeing a man tear up a good check for eight hundred thousand dollars." These examples may not be the most inspiring, but they suggest generosity as well as extravagance, a sense of possibility as well as self-indulgence. Fitzgerald is evenhanded in his summary: "It was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire." We need someone to cast a clear eye on the Internet era, reminding us of what was good about it as well as what was superficial and naive.

We now cringe at the word dot-com the way actors shrink from mention of Macbeth. The idea of a dot-com novel seems even more distasteful. But banishing a memory is always unhealthy. If novelists choose not to look back, then literature will present a partial and therefore distorted view of our history. The writer's task is to investigate the dark, messy side of the human condition, to scrutinize what we shrink from, whether it is death, adultery – or dot-coms.

Helena Echlin is a freelance writer and author of the novel Gone.