Temporary Paradise

Stephanie LaCava’s The Superrationals, set largely in 2015, is a “before the fall” novel. Like their Austro-Hungarian counterparts in Hermann Broch’s The Sleepwalkers or Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities, the Americans in The Superrationals belong to a wealthy, cosmopolitan elite in a transnational order they do not know is on the verge of collapse. They work in the art world, in the publishing industry, in the academy, or for NGOs. They spend significant time on transatlantic flights and intercontinental flights and in cabs and on the Eurostar. They wear their diplomas like identification badges and, needless to say, the only public college mentioned in the novel is a certain graduate program at the University of Iowa. They talk about politics rarely, and when they do their positions are meant to be taken as expressions of sophisticated taste. “She went through her days trying to derail her life and privilege,” LaCava writes of one of them, “never quite succeeding.”