Quoting Stephen Marche

Stephen Marche on Capital in the Twenty-First Century and contemporary US fiction:

The arc of Franzenite fiction goes from leaving the bosom of an institution to finding a place in the world of markets and neighbors....Universities are natural subjects for the bourgeois novel of the moment because they have become expensive ways of replicating privilege, of falling in with the right sort of people, of learning the prerequisite social codes....An American Ivy League education is, first and foremost, a class marker....College has essentially replaced the debutante ball and the presentation at court....The characters in all these novels strive to understand society’s codes and then to obey them....The novel of the second gilded age is a novel for hoop-jumpers....This was the 1990s on campus: educated in the panvictimology of alternative culture, people of privilege learned to hate the source of their privilege while maintaining their own status in perfect working order. -Stephen Marche ('The Literature of the Second Gilded Age')