Nostalgia for comfort

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n The Mandibles: 2029-2047, Lionel Shriver narrates the effects of a future financial ruin on several generations of a middle-class American family between the years 2029 and 2047: the dollar ceases to be the standard currency, Russia and China dominate the world, and the Rio Grande wall prevents Americans from crossing the Mexican border. The Mandibles can no longer afford their elders' residence, they must share an apartment in Brooklyn, a lettuce costs twenty dollars, olive oil is a luxury product, and the younger generation must learn to survive self-taught, with a very dark sense of humor and applying a high imaginative dose to their particular economy. Less satirical, in The Heart Goes Last, Margaret Atwood creates a young couple from the northwest coast who have to live in their car due to the economic recession, rapes and organ thefts are not the worst misfortunes that plague the region, and the dream of recovering the meaning of life and protection against its evils can lead them to accept the job and home forever advertised by Consilience, a development designed according to the aesthetics and principles of the Puritan suburbs of white America in the fifties: Doris Day is the role model.

The present that Cormac McCarthy describes in The Road is more apocalyptic, a burnt forest: the only horizon is an inert road where the dream of well-being no longer exists, and the only question that can be asked is how to protect the family when there is nothing left to protect. In these three recent dystopias, testimonies of present trends and phenomena taken to the most negative extremes, McCarthy, Atwood, and Shriver reflect the concerns and fears of the moment in which they are written. "The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed," said William Gibson in 2003, the great science fiction author who has been moving towards a narrative set in the present and in the intimate relationships maintained with technology.

UNATTAINABLE CHIMERAS. The sharp and ironic radiography of the consumer society of the sixties, of the mystification of comfort, of the pleasures offered by a world that proposes multiple mirages of unattainable chimeras, traced by Georges Perec in Things: A Story of the Sixties, is now very far away: despite the precarious work they had, despite living in a tiny and uncomfortable apartment, Jérôme and Sylvie have enough illusion to fall into the irresistible temptation of dreaming that one day they will be rich and enjoy the opulence and refinements they see in the shop windows of Paris.

After all, it was another way of fixing the vital dissatisfaction of the middle class and the aspiration of bourgeois values that Flaubert had already outlined in Sentimental Education: «There are three parties, those who have, those who do not have, and those who try to have»; or in Madame Bovary: if Emma gets into debt in that suicidal way with the usurious merchant of her town, it is because she does not have access to the department stores that Émile Zola turns into protagonists of The Ladies' Paradise, the first novel in which a new concept of sales appears that revolutionizes commerce, causes social upheaval, and directly affects people who come in search of a desired product that they had not even imagined they vehemently needed: sellers and customers are satisfied to inhabit a new land of promises full of fresh products. But the work is exhausting and personal life suffers: «They were no longer all of them but gears dragged along by the running machine, forcing them to abdicate their personality, limiting themselves to adding forces in an anodyne and powerful phalanstery. Only when they left there did they recover an individual existence and the sudden flame of their passions ignited in them».

But in Lost Illusions Balzac already warns that the social triumph of someone from the provinces in the metropolitan centers is so difficult that they may only find ruin, and Dickens, in Great Expectations, warns of the unpleasant surprises that arise when one only encounters the «great reality»: it is the same thing that happens to Ramón Villaamil, the Madrid bureaucrat from Miau, a great novel by Pérez Galdós, who is expelled from his office when he is only two months away from retirement and the crisis of pride pushes him towards madness and suicide.

PIZZA DELIVERY DRIVERS. More pragmatic, perhaps because the economic fluctuations of Argentine reality endow them with a high instinctive capacity for survival, the retired couple from Las noches de Flores, by César Aira (one of the most precise surgeons of today's middle-class tics), become nocturnal pizza delivery drivers: their only illusion and sole hope is that the armies of the night do not rob them. Aira's retirees discover that each stage of decadence entails new forms of frustration and unhappiness. It is the first thing one notices during the reading of En la soledad de un cielo muerto, by Laury Leite, the story of a character's journey through the ruins that progress has left behind: André, a Mexican living in Madrid, has a shop, a girlfriend, and a house, but the economic crisis of 2007 interrupts the usual course of events and the life he led crumbles. He loses the shop, he loses the house, and, when money starts to become scarce, his relationship with his girlfriend deteriorates: the collective crisis transforms into a type of existential crisis, and the protagonist, suddenly, finds himself completely lost and disoriented. And then it is legitimate to remember that the philosopher Byung-Chul Han says that, if in Foucault's surveillance society the marginalized were the mad and the criminals, now they are people with anxiety disorders and depressions.

It is one of the consequences of discovering that the middle class only exists as a fictitious social class, a speculation that Belén Gopegui has taken it upon herself to highlight in each of her anti-capitalist novels: in Quédate este día y esta noche conmigo, the protagonist, Mateo, no longer believes that any social contract needs to be fulfilled, labor discipline is a waste of time, and, as individual progress is impossible, he does not see it as madness to consider that placing a homemade bomb at Google's headquarters could fix some injustice. It is another way of putting Ricardo Piglia's diagnosis into practice: "Tolstoy's individualistic anarchism is an extreme response to the capitalist mentality, but also to Lenin's theory of revolutionary violence."

Less combative and more resigned, the protagonists of Marta Rojals' novels (Primavera, estiu, etcètera and L'altra), or Jordi Nopca's short stories (Vente a casa), confirm that they didn't need to study so much to queue at unemployment offices, to get lost in the labyrinths of cities, to submit to the threads of a reality that moves them from the shadows, prisoners of a strangeness that permeates them in the most intimate areas of their privacy, and without the option of checking the validity of the memory of their ancestors' experience: they have already grown accustomed to living on the edge of the elements, to looking for cheap apartments, and to settling for a job that lasts a little longer than the previous one.

PARENTS AND CHILDREN. If Jérôme and Sylvie were to flee the pages of Las cosas, and could read Roberto Saviano's latest book, La banda de los niños, they would return to their tiny apartment with the firm resolve never to go out into the street again: they would have realized that teenagers in Naples no longer read books, that they educate themselves with YouTube and PornHub, that they despise their parents because they are simple workers who earn a meager salary, and that they admire Islamic State terrorists because they are not afraid to die nor have any remorse when it comes to killing. In Roberto Saviano's novel/chronicle, being an adult is no longer about creating a family and raising children, but about immediately satisfying, at any cost, any desire, because the only certainty is the assurance that tomorrow does not exist. "Friend, enemy, life or death, it's all the same," says one of Saviano's characters, and, evidently, with this panorama of expectations, the vital tranquility that the middle class pursued does not seem to have many guarantees for survival.