Discussed in this essay:

The Subprimes, by Karl Taro Greenfeld. HarperCollins. 320 pages. $25.99.

It is hard for a fiction writer to know how to engage the present American moment head-on. Social instability — not just resentment over the growing economic gulf between rich and poor but the mainstreaming of the notion that the state itself, especially in its few merciful aspects, should be drowned in the proverbial bathtub — feels less theoretical right now than it has in eighty years, since John Dos Passos concluded “all right we are two…