Their tale is one of downward mobility, of the casualties of capitalism, of all the ways that Americans are set up to fail. The narrator and her husband are in the midst of declaring bankruptcy.
The disaster at the heart of Want is slower moving than coronavirus, less newsworthy than the threat of fascism, but is no less relevant to our time, and no less widespread. The narrator, unnamed until the penultimate page, asks herself throughout the book: Why did I study English? Why did I think that sharing books with people was a worthwhile way to spend my life? What can a book do in a time like this? It’s a question central to Want, Lynn Steger Strong’s second novel. Authors have long asked whether fiction is useful in times of crisis, a question that has been especially pronounced in the past four years, following the election of the current president, the advent of coronavirus, and the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.
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