The Hunger Game

“Families are always rising or falling in America,” said Nathaniel Hawthorne. The highest a family can rise, I suppose, is by establishing itself as a baronial dynasty such as the Vanderbilts or Kennedys, achieving a comfortable financial security that lasts through the generations.

An astute observer of contemporary society in his Esquire magazine column, Stephen Marche, the author of The Hunger of the Wolf, has pointed out in an essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books that the literature of our Second Gilded Age, as exemplified by Jonathan Franzen and Rachel Kushner, takes its inspiration from 19th-century novelists such as Balzac, for whom themes of property and profit were paramount. Marche’s new book, his fourth, fits easily into the category of this neo-bourgeois novel, dealing trenchantly with precisely these questions of money, family and marriage.

The Hunger of the Wolf traces the rise of an American media...