Humorous cli-fi novel is ‘subprime’ but far from sub-par

By Dan Bloom

CHIAYI CITY, Taiwan — Karl Taro Greenfeld is the son of a Hollywood screenwriter and a Japanese novelist and was blessed with the writer genes he inherited from both his parents. Born in Japan in 1964, Greenfeld grew up in Los Angeles in the 1970s and graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in New York in 1987. Since then the longform journalist and magazine editor — he ran the Time Asia edition in Hong Kong for two years — has been writing up a storm on several continents, using his bicultural background to carve out a journalistic and literary career that has led him to the top of his game.

Now. Greenfeld has just published his second novel, this one a comic ‘cli-fi’ novel, The Subprimes, and it has received good reviews already in the New York Times, Boing Boing and NPR. Last year, unaware that he was working on a new novel, I asked Greenfeld via Facebook if he has heard of the new literary genre of “cli-fi” that I was promoting and he Facebooked back in Internet time saying “my new novel could be probably be considered ‘cli-fi’.” Now The Subprimes is out and yes, it’s a cli-fi for sure.

Cory Doctorow, writing recently in the Harvard Business Review, calls Greenfeld’s new novel a “light comedy about weighty subjects: wealth inequality, environmental devastation, the erosion of democratic representation, the creation of a hereditary moneyed class, and the disastrous false consciousness of the American populace.”

“It’s a road-trip novel (actually, it’s several road-trip novels, having many point-of-view characters) set in a near-future plutocratic, climate-wracked America,” Doctorow adds.

With a deeply-focused mind and a comic sense of humor, Greenfeld has mined The Subprimes as a kind of Swiftian satire on where America is today, or will be in a rapidly-approaching near future. Like Nathaniel Rich’s 2013 cli-fi satire Odds Against Tomorrow, which almost single-handedly set the cli-fi genre on its meteoric rise after a NPR radio segment lit up social media from coast to coast, Greenfeld’s comic take (with serious undertones) is yet another “light comedy about weighty subjects,” continuing an enduring and endearing American and British literary tradition.

The author of Speed Tribes: Days and Nights with Japan’s Next Generation and Standard Deviations: Growing Up and Coming Down in the New Asia” Greenfeld has a way with words and his new novel is striking a chord already among those younger readers who have grown up in what I will call “the New America” — post-Occupy Wall Street and post-Big Banking.

I have known Greenfeld since the early 1990s when I worked as a journalist in Tokyo, after I met his mother, Fumiko Kometani, the author of a prize-winning novel there titled Passover, among other Japanese-language books she wrote. His father, Josh Greenfeld, is the acclaimed Jewish-American author of A Child Called Noah, A Place for Noah,’ and ‘‘A Client Called Noah.

You could say that The Subprimes is about a heroine named Sangam who may or may not be the long-awaited Messiah, and as the Harvard Business Review put it ”a keenly predictive book — predicting the present in a way that we desperately need.”

The banking term title? It refers to the novel’s homeless squatters who are named after the risky, subprime mortgages that drove them into poverty in the first place and are now forced to eke out a meager living either as underpaid day-laborers or working on the ”fracking” sites. Greenfeld’s comic take on all this is both a hoot and a wake-up call.

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Bloom, based in Taiwan, is a cli-fi enthusiast and  inveterate internet surfer.  You may comment to dan.bloom@sdjewishworld.com, or post your comment on this website, provided that the rules below are observed.

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