John Freeman reports on an evening with George Saunders (above) and Jonathan Lethem. Freeman writes:

Just yesterday, the New York Times reported that the income disparity in America grew significantly, with the top 1 percent receiving their largest share of the national income since 1928(!) Average gains in income in this bracket were $1.1 million per person. On top of that, the top ten percent of American society — those who make $100,000 or more — has its largest share of wealth since the Great Depression. This is shameful.

I think there is only so long before this state of affairs becomes more visibly reflected in American fiction. There have been some very good novels and short story collections published in the last ten years which engage with class — and America’s underclass — books by William T. Vollmann (”The Rainbow Stories” and “Poor People”), Edward P. Jones (”Lost in the City”), Saunders (”Civilwarland in Bad Decline”) Ernesto Quinonez (”Bodega Dreams”) Richard Russo (”Empire Falls”), John Updike (”Terrorist,” the Rabbit tetrology), Louise Erdrich (”The Bingo Palace”), Whitney Terrell (”The King of Kings County”), Susan Straight (”Highwire Moon”), Larry Brown (”Fay”) Jonathan Franzen (”The Corrections”), Junot Diaz (”Drown”) and crime writers like George Pelecanos, Scott Phillips, Barbara Neely, and Walter Mosley (in fact, one could make the argument no one engages this theme more consistently and realistically than crime writers do).

But part of me hungers for a furious book, a “Dead Souls” of the contemporary American city — not the shiny one, but the rotting, forgotten one — a book that doesn’t get at class through middle class anxiety (which Barbara Ehrenreich got at in her terrific book, “Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class”), but something that goes from the bottom upward.