In The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James's 1881 novel, there is a scene between Ralph Touchett and his dying father, in which the younger successfully convinces the elder to leave a good deal of money to his cousin, Isabel Archer. Isabel, until this point, has lived an independent life, turning down marriage proposals in favor of adventure—spared, as she describes it, by her own misfortunes. "I've neither father nor mother; I'm poor and of a serious disposition; I'm not pretty," she tells one suitor. "I therefore am not bound to be timid or conventional; indeed I cannot afford such luxuries."
Still, Ralph is aware of the financial compromises Isabel will eventually have to make and wants to guarantee her fiery autonomy beyond her youth: "If she has an easy income, she'll never have to marry for support," he tells his father. "She wishes to be free, and your bequest will make her free."
I was reminded of Portrait when reading Nan Mooney's (Not) Keeping Up with Our Parents, which will be published next month. Clearly the two books couldn't be more different—a 19th-century novel of manners and a 21st-century journalistic account of financial crisis—but both offer a chilling look at the power of money, or the lack thereof, and its radiating effects on our lives. Mooney proposes that the disadvantage that James was exploring way back when—that the path to financial security is through marriage—seems to exist again. "Buying a house, paying down debt, or saving for a viable retirement can seem like insurmountable obstacles for one person alone. The single life is no longer necessarily the embodiment of freedom," writes Mooney in her galvanizing book. "Instead, for many, it's marriage that comes to be viewed as the great liberator."
Mooney's statistics alone are jaw-dropping: American household debt has grown from 33.2 percent of disposable income to 131.8 percent in just under 50 years; hours worked by couples with children have risen 30 percent since 1975; approximately one in six households has zero to negative net worth. She offers vivid and varied portraits of the people who make up these numbers—people who find themselves in the "catchall category" of the middle class, whose work ranges from air-force pilot to faculty member at a prestigious medical school, with salaries between $30,000 and $100,000—all of whom are hanging on to financial stability by their fingernails. (I must admit I devoured these details of others' fiscal lives as if I were reading pages from their diaries. This book does for money what the HBO drama Tell Me You Love Me does for sex. Which, in both cases, is basically to point out that most of us don't have enough.)
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