2 Books About Other People’s Money

Dear readers,

I’m surprised by how rarely I encounter money in fiction — not casual hints of its abundance (trust funds, oversaturated educations, uninterrupted sleep) or painful absence, but actual grimy bills, checks uncovered long past their 180-day lives, the siren calls of Klarna and Afterpay.

Strange, too, that so few books deal substantively with a near-universal vexation, by which I mean the tax system. Then again: To most reasonable people, taxes are a stand-in for drudgery. They are stressful. They are unfair and, at worst, insulting. (Have you filed yours yet, by the way?)

But taxes also offer ample material, it seems to me, starting with the existential questions they bring up. What is my life worth? What do I owe? What is enough?

At this point I should confess I have a perverse patience for the U.S. tax code, not least because I marvel at the obstinacy of its idiom. You mean to tell me that we have recondite, intricate rules boobytrapping our finances that require a specialized degree or a Rosetta Stone to interpret, and interpreting them incorrectly could lead to ruinous fines, prison or both?

And we’re supposed to just take this?

Plus, it’s fun to read about other people’s money. So in that spirit, here is a selection of books that grapple with these questions. One note, to pre-empt any howls of oversight: In the same boneheaded, stubborn vein that for years led me to compute my taxes by hand, I am not including the U.S. tax system’s most famous starring role in fiction, David Foster Wallace’s posthumous novel, “The Pale King.” That book momentarily elevated the I.R.S. into a literary sensation, just as Nicholson Baker’s “Vox” did for phone sex, and plenty others have written about it. Taxes should be a little tough, and I’m not one to give myself an easy out. But I’ve always gotten a refund.

—Joumana