Temporary Concerns: The Limits of Meritocracy in You Don’t Have to Live Like This

Lola Boorman

Temporary Concerns: The Limits of Meritocracy in You Don’t Have to Live Like This

English and Related Literature

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter (peer-reviewed) › peer-review

Abstract

This chapter reads You Don't Have to Live Like This (2015) as a novel concerned with the paradoxes of meritocracy in an era of financial crisis. It explores the novel's struggle to reconcile pervasive myths and ideologies about work, achievement, reproduction, education, and happiness with an environment dominated by material collapse, social fracture, inequality, and generational stagnation or decline. It also struggles to align meritocracy's emphasis on generational investment with a neoliberal system that engenders a temporal sense of the ‘stretched out now.' Markovits’s novel addresses this temporal disjunction by adopting a literary mode defined by Alexander Manshel (2017) as the ‘recent historical novel’ as a means of interrogating the complicit relationship between narrative form and the familiar parable of upward mobility. You Don’t Have to Live Like This disrupts its own impulse to historicize and to conform to meritocratic narratives of progress and improvement, pursuing, instead (or, perhaps, in spite of itself), a logic of anti-development that presents the figure of the child both as an emblem of meritocracy’s regressive ‘sham’ (D. Markovits, 2019, ix) and a figure of optimistic reinvention.

Original language	English
Title of host publication	Benjamin Markovits
Subtitle of host publication	Critical Essays
Editors	Michael Kalisch
Publisher	Routledge
Publication status	Accepted/In press - 2024

Publication series

Name	Contemporary Writers: Critical Essays
Publisher	Routledge

Cite this

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title = "Temporary Concerns: The Limits of Meritocracy in You Don{\textquoteright}t Have to Live Like This",

abstract = "This chapter reads You Don't Have to Live Like This (2015) as a novel concerned with the paradoxes of meritocracy in an era of financial crisis. It explores the novel's struggle to reconcile pervasive myths and ideologies about work, achievement, reproduction, education, and happiness with an environment dominated by material collapse, social fracture, inequality, and generational stagnation or decline. It also struggles to align meritocracy's emphasis on generational investment with a neoliberal system that engenders a temporal sense of the {\textquoteleft}stretched out now.' Markovits{\textquoteright}s novel addresses this temporal disjunction by adopting a literary mode defined by Alexander Manshel (2017) as the {\textquoteleft}recent historical novel{\textquoteright} as a means of interrogating the complicit relationship between narrative form and the familiar parable of upward mobility. You Don{\textquoteright}t Have to Live Like This disrupts its own impulse to historicize and to conform to meritocratic narratives of progress and improvement, pursuing, instead (or, perhaps, in spite of itself), a logic of anti-development that presents the figure of the child both as an emblem of meritocracy{\textquoteright}s regressive {\textquoteleft}sham{\textquoteright} (D. Markovits, 2019, ix) and a figure of optimistic reinvention. ",

author = "Lola Boorman",

year = "2024",

language = "English",

series = "Contemporary Writers: Critical Essays",

publisher = "Routledge",

editor = "Kalisch, {Michael }",

booktitle = "Benjamin Markovits",

address = "United Kingdom",

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PY - 2024

Y1 - 2024

N2 - This chapter reads You Don't Have to Live Like This (2015) as a novel concerned with the paradoxes of meritocracy in an era of financial crisis. It explores the novel's struggle to reconcile pervasive myths and ideologies about work, achievement, reproduction, education, and happiness with an environment dominated by material collapse, social fracture, inequality, and generational stagnation or decline. It also struggles to align meritocracy's emphasis on generational investment with a neoliberal system that engenders a temporal sense of the ‘stretched out now.' Markovits’s novel addresses this temporal disjunction by adopting a literary mode defined by Alexander Manshel (2017) as the ‘recent historical novel’ as a means of interrogating the complicit relationship between narrative form and the familiar parable of upward mobility. You Don’t Have to Live Like This disrupts its own impulse to historicize and to conform to meritocratic narratives of progress and improvement, pursuing, instead (or, perhaps, in spite of itself), a logic of anti-development that presents the figure of the child both as an emblem of meritocracy’s regressive ‘sham’ (D. Markovits, 2019, ix) and a figure of optimistic reinvention.

AB - This chapter reads You Don't Have to Live Like This (2015) as a novel concerned with the paradoxes of meritocracy in an era of financial crisis. It explores the novel's struggle to reconcile pervasive myths and ideologies about work, achievement, reproduction, education, and happiness with an environment dominated by material collapse, social fracture, inequality, and generational stagnation or decline. It also struggles to align meritocracy's emphasis on generational investment with a neoliberal system that engenders a temporal sense of the ‘stretched out now.' Markovits’s novel addresses this temporal disjunction by adopting a literary mode defined by Alexander Manshel (2017) as the ‘recent historical novel’ as a means of interrogating the complicit relationship between narrative form and the familiar parable of upward mobility. You Don’t Have to Live Like This disrupts its own impulse to historicize and to conform to meritocratic narratives of progress and improvement, pursuing, instead (or, perhaps, in spite of itself), a logic of anti-development that presents the figure of the child both as an emblem of meritocracy’s regressive ‘sham’ (D. Markovits, 2019, ix) and a figure of optimistic reinvention.

M3 - Chapter (peer-reviewed)

T3 - Contemporary Writers: Critical Essays

BT - Benjamin Markovits

A2 - Kalisch, Michael

PB - Routledge

ER -