[Innocent wayfarers, beware. This essay contains what are vulgarly known in the trade as “spoilers,” so if for some unfathomable reason you’ve yet to view Succession, Glass Onion, and The White Lotus, tread gingerly and try not to gasp.] It may be the most famous and chewed-over exchange in American literature that never actually took place, at least not in real time. In 1936, when the country was still in the hold of the Great Depression and in no mood for mooniness, Esquire magazine published Ernest Hemingway’s cinematic story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” a meditation on mortality and the beautiful consoling desolation of a cathedral mountain, all that. Amid the flashbacks and the regrets, the narrator couldn’t resist sneaking in a catty sideswipe: “He remembered poor Scott Fitzgerald and his romantic awe of them and how he had started a story once that began, ‘The very rich are different from you and me.’ And how someone had said to Scott, ‘Yes, they have more money’.” That “someone” was of course Hemingway himself, unable to resist puffing his chest at “poor Scott”‘s expense. Earlier the same year Esquire had published Fitzgerald’s revelatory confessional “The Crack-Up,” so it was understood that he was in a precarious state. Fitzgerald’s understandable ire at being mocked and misrepresented — he complained to their mutual editor, the Solomonic Maxwell Perkins — forced Hemingway to soften the passage later for hardcover publication and substitute the weak-water name “Julian” for “poor Scott.” Didn’t matter. Sophisticated readers knew the real score. For decades, the original back and forth in print was patted down and packed into a tidy conversational anecdote, with Hemingway’s snappy comeback considered by many (most?) the definitive retort — a bull’s-eye reality check — to Fitzgerald’s dreamy, minty-green Jazz Age romanticism. The verdict has been reversed over time. Is there any doubt today that Fitzgerald, swimming in the aqua sparkle of his own perceptions, had it right and Hemingway was talking out of his pith helmet? It was Lionel Trilling who defended the Fitzgerald case most elegantly. “The truth is that after a certain point quantity of money does indeed change into quality of personality: in an important sense the very rich are different from us…” It was true then and it is even truer in this millennium. The evidence pimp-slapped in our faces is that the rich are more different from the rest of us than ever before — they are evolving into a mutant species. As the middle class is increasingly whittled thin — witness union jobs being replaced by a gig economy, the coronation of corporate executives, the premature knighting of Palo Alto wunderkinds, the emergence of Davos Man, and saturation bombing of the airwaves with ad blitzes for online sports gambling and mega-millions lottery draws — the chasm is widening yearly between the have-somethings and the have-it-alls. It has only gotten worse since Covid, only widened. Tech billionaires, hedge funders, private equity predators, Saudi princes, Russian oligarchs, the former president who besmirched the office, and similar excrescences of turbo-charged late-stage lift-off capitalism have top-loaded this century into a second Gilded Age, one that even the ongoing global recession hasn’t been able to dent. 
A second Gilded Age might seem to be a bonanza opportunity for novelists, for some young, hip, penetrative Gen X/Gen M/Gen Z/Gen-whatever Edith Wharton to train her spy glasses or AR goggles on. But perhaps the spectacle of the mega-rich is simply more than contemporary novelists (a more inwardly investigating crew) can consolidate. The traditional big social novel of manners and disturbing flutters in the drawing room may be too antiquated an undertaking. The pursuit of great wealth and the cruel delight of writing the little ingrates out of your will largely disappeared from serious fiction, as serious fiction itself has been eased into the infirmary. The strenuous toils of Theodore Dreiser (The Titan, The Financier) belong to an iron age. The stately mansions of later John O’Hara lie empty and neglected. Inherited money inhabited the background of Louis Auchincloss’s novels, but it was a listless resource, carpet-worn. The contemporary remakes and invocations of The Great Gatsby — will we ever be rid of them? — offered retro cosplay that’s unable to capture the lyrical lift of the prose, the goosy thrill of Puritan restraint being kicked to the curb and the human body flowing free as if for the first time. The field was left to commercial pop fiction to project fantasies of the rich, virile, fertile, and resplendent in potboilers whipped to a mad fandango by Jacqueline Susann, Judith Krantz, Harold Robbins, Shirley Conran, and other pagan immortals of the airport paperback rack. Some of the anecdotes in these concoctions may have been pinched from honest gossip but the overall effect was of escapist make-believe. For a brief fun time, before everything got engorged, the true signifiers of American wealth required a keen acquisitive eye to spot. They didn’t call undue attention to themselves, but were hostessy and understated, niblet-sized and exquisitely prepared. Truman Capote, who prided himself on being the keenest double agent inside the velvet folds since Marcel Proust, informed an interviewer that what separated the rich from the rest of us primates was their serving of tiny vegetables: “Delicious little tiny vegetables. Little fresh-born things scarcely out of the earth. Little baby corn, little baby peas, little lambs that have been ripped out of their mothers’ wombs.” Tom Wolfe’s New York magazine account of Leonard Bernstein’s fundraiser for the Black Panthers — “Radical Chic” — introduced us to the party with a rapture over the hor d’oeuvres. “Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. These are nice. Little Roquefort cheese morsels rolled in crushed nuts. Very tasty. Very subtle. It’s the way the dry sackiness of the nuts tiptoes up against the dour savor of the cheese that is so nice, so subtle.” Not that there wasn’t the occasional representative of wealth with more democratic taste buds. William F. Buckley, Jr., whose sailboats were stocked with wine and champagne
There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence