7 Novels About the Empty Promises of the Meritocracy

Of all the lies contemporary society runs on, the fiction of the meritocracy may be the most insidious and inescapable. Even those cynical about its promises have no choice but to place their trust in its precepts. If you’re born with the odds stacked against you—whether because of your class, race, gender, or place of origin—what can you do but hope that with enough studying, hard work, networking, and sheer optimism you’ll one day achieve deliverance? And what do you do when you realize the most may not be enough? What new story must you tell yourself then?

My debut novel, Ways and Means, centers on a lower-middle-class finance student who becomes embroiled in a nefarious scheme after he fails to land his dream job in investment banking, and as I was writing it I took inspiration from novels that take a skeptical view of our meritocratic fantasies. In each of these books, characters invariably come to one of two crushing realizations: 1) no matter what they do, they’ll never achieve the success they dreamed of, or 2) even if they do, it won’t bring them the happiness they expected. How these characters respond to that realization varies: some find alternate sources of sustenance and faith, others meet ruin, others simply truck on. But what unites these novels—and what makes them surprising—is that they manage to forge from this disappointment works of startling beauty.

Age of Vice by Deepti Kapoor

Kapoor’s 2023 novel is billed as an Indian version of The Godfather, and it offers much to support that comparison: corrupt clans and cronies, indomitable fathers and wayward sons, gruesome bloodshed. But the most trenchant of the novel’s multiple interwoven narratives is that of Ajay, an impoverished young man who becomes the chief servant to the scion of a wealthy crime family. Ajay is rewarded for his reliability and attentiveness with money and access to glamour he never dreamed of. But he soon discovers that the quality that makes him an ideal servant—his loyalty—also makes him an ideal candidate for another role: the fall guy for a wealthier person’s crime. 

The End of Eddy by Édouard Louis, translated by Michael Lucey

Those who most ferociously latch on to the promises of the meritocracy are often those most desperate to leave home. That’s the case for the hero of Louis’s autobiographical debut novel, a queer coming-of-age novel set in rural France. Alienated from his community, with its traditional gender roles and idolatry of masculinity, the protagonist, Eddy, works to distinguish himself intellectually in hopes of fleeing to a more welcoming place. And though Eddy succeeds, Louis takes care to illustrate one of the crueler ironies of meritocratic salvation: no matter how far Eddy goes, he’ll never shake off his perverse longing for home, and no matter how much he might have earned his place in a new milieu, he’ll never feel entirely at home there either. 

NW by Zadie Smith

Smith’s novel follows four characters from a lower-middle-class neighborhood in northwest London as they make their way, romantically and professionally, through early adulthood. But it’s the character of Keisha (later she’ll go by Natalie) who occupies the largest portion of the story, inspires Smith’s most daring formal experiments, and illustrates most clearly the crushing alienations of meritocratic yearning. Trained as a lawyer, Natalie builds a life centered on following rules, impressing teachers and colleagues, and adhering to the rigid path of upward mobility: she believes, as Smith puts it, “life was a problem that could be solved by means of professionalization.” But the hollowness of this life eventually eats away at Natalie, driving her to seek out meaning and satisfaction in an increasingly desperate manner. 

The New Me by Halle Butler

Millie, the protagonist of Halle Butler’s second novel, is an office temp in Chicago languishing just outside what in corporate America passes for the promised land: permanent, salaried employment. Her resentment—toward her circumstances, toward her colleagues, toward herself—fuels much of the novel’s lacerating inner monologue and telegraphs the hopelessness that even intelligent, capable people feel in our increasingly precarious economy. As Jia Tolentino wrote of the book’s narrator in the New Yorker: “Despite Millie’s acknowledgment that she might strive all her life without ever being happy or doing anything meaningful, striving nonetheless provides the entire grammar of her life.”

In the Light of What We Know by Zia Haider Rahman

At the beginning of Rahman’s 2014 novel the unnamed narrator finds his old university friend, Zafar, in a shocking state. Zafar, once a banker and human rights lawyer, is now emaciated, bedraggled, and apparently broke. From there the book proceeds to tell the story of Zafar’s stunning rise—from poverty in rural Bangladesh to Oxbridge to Wall Street—and even more stunning fall. That story is one of enchantment followed by growing resentment and finally rage: at the ethical horrors of geopolitics and high finance, at the intransigency of a class and racial hierarchy that will never fully accommodate those perceived as outsiders, at the inability of intelligence and success to compensate for the traumas of early deprivation. “Childhood poverty,” Zafar says, “looms over one’s whole life.”

Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind by Molly McGhee

Buying into the promises of the meritocracy also means, for many, taking on a lot of debt. One such indentured dreamer is Jonathan Abernathy, the protagonist of McGhee’s debut novel. In hopes of paying off his staggering loans, Abernathy accepts a job auditing the dreams of American workers and scrubbing the ones liable to produce feelings—anxiety, sadness, longing—that will make them less productive. In this way Abernathy finds himself abetting the very capitalist system that has ground him down. McGhee’s book points to a brutal irony of our contemporary work culture: alleviating our own burdens often entails burdening those who, in another world, might be our class comrades-in-arms. 

The Firm by John Grisham

John Grisham’s 1991 novel may be the classic tale of meritocratic striving. It follows Mitch McDeere, a freshly graduated law student from inauspicious circumstances, as he joins a law firm in Memphis and slowly uncovers its dark secrets. Grisham lavishes attention on the glamorous perks of McDeere’s job to underscore a larger point: the people who lack a safety net, who desire success most desperately, are often the people who find it hardest to challenge wrongdoings in the institutions to which they’ve attached themselves. That McDeere does challenge them—and that he pilfers a vengeful fortune in the process—is part of what makes him an enduring hero.