Economist novelist Jonathan Wight makes a statement
I was at a wedding in April when a man in a striking white suit walked down the aisle and sat among the guests. The next day I caught up with him at the wedding brunch.
“Mark Twain?” I asked, referring to one novelist who always wore a white suit.
“Tom Wolfe,” he replied, referring to another.
The man was Jonathan Wight, a just-retired economics professor from the University of Richmond who mentioned that he had published a novel in 2001 called Saving Adam Smith. This information threw me for a loop.
How well I remember Adam Smith from my one and only economics class in high school in Palo Alto! The teacher beat it into us that “time is money” and that an unfettered free market is necessary because Smith’s “invisible hand” would sort everything out in the most beneficial way to society. When Ronald Reagan became president, I understand where those ideas came from.
“A lot of what you hear about Smith is wrong,” Wight said, munching on his bagel. “This idea that it’s all about unfettered greed and allowing people to do whatever they want and somehow the magical outcome for society will pop up at the other end, that is just farcical.” He later explained that one of the main proponents of this depiction is Ayn Rand (author of The Fountainhead): “Ayn Rand inspired a lot of people from the 20th century to think that Adam Smith endorsed greed and zero government, and that’s just a complete misreading.”
In Wight’s novel, the 18th century Scottish economist Adam Smith rises from the dead in protest and resurrects himself inside Harold Timms, a Romanian automobile mechanic living in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Smith commandeers Timms over to the closest accessible economist, a young ABD graduate student, Richard Burns, who knows all about Smith (the caricature) even though he’s never read him. Burns, who is under the thumb of an arrogant laissez-faire economist, is about to reveal a formula at a conference to be attended by a multinational corporation who wants to buy the formula for a privatization deal in Russia. Adam Smith interrupts all that. After Smith convinces Burns that he is the real thing, the duo go on a cross-country road trip together to California where the conference will be held. On the road Smith dissuades Burns of the cliches about him and gives him a primer in Enlightenment ideas. It turns out that instead of reading Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, people should start with Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments, the more important foundational text. Smith’s “invisible hand” assumes a competitive marketplace and no harm to people (like pollution). While on the road, the duo narrowly miss a number of terrorist attacks aimed at them. Amusingly, both characters egotistically think they are the target – Burns because of his formula and Smith because of his actual (moral) ideas that enemies (like Ayn Rand) would want to suppress.
Wight thought that Saving Adam Smith and other writings have corrected the Smith caricature to the point where the novel would not need to be written. Today “you have to be very ignorant to hold onto the caricature view of Adam Smith,” he said. But since I had not gotten that memo, I appreciated Wight’s novel and the context he provided. It was also a stroke of luck just to sit next to an economist and be able to ask about the economic situation we are now in today. What about our world Smith would approve of?
Well, what’s very Smithian would be globalization over the past 50 years. That has dramatically raised a lot of people out of poverty. Hundreds of millions of Chinese and Indians have been lifted out of poverty by accessing the global trading system, and that’s quite deliberately Smithian. At the same time, he would not at all be happy about, for example, Russia invading Ukraine because he wrote about how deluded rulers were to think that they could make money by invading other countries and he wanted them to wake up from their delusional dreams. He thought that imperialism was a big waste of money and a benefit of the elites at the expense of the poor. So there’s a lot going on in the world that he would like and there’s a lot he wouldn’t like. He wouldn’t like how modern tech companies have become monopolized to the extent that they have.
In Wight’s novel I appreciated the amusing juxtaposition of the lofty Adam Smith inside highway truck stops and dive bars. When Wight showed the full gamut of social classes by having Richard and Adam Smith visit the Chicago opera and skewered pretentious attendees, he brought Tom Wolfe to mind.
“I’m thrilled that you mention me in the same paragraph as Tom Wolfe,” Wight replied. “I love and admire Tom Wolfe.”
Tom Wolfe himself was born and raised in Richmond, and Wight heard him give a reading at the University of Richmond on his architectural critique From Bauhaus to Our House (1981). Wolfe later turned to writing journalistic novels such as The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987), The Man in Full (1998), and I Am Charlotte Simmons (2004). Wight appreciates the immediacy of Wolfe’s “new journalism” as well as his satire – “he pops people’s bubbles of pomposity, which I appreciate.”
Yet after the wedding Wight claimed that the literary allusion of his white suit was purely unintentional; the suit was his wife’s idea. After all, a white suit is completely impractical: “I mean you can only wear it once and then it has to go to the dry cleaners cuz it’s a white suit, it picks up everything.” People who have written about the white suit such as Inigo Thomas make this same point: the white suit is wildly impractical and that is part of its allure.
In the 1951 British film The Man in the White Suit (starring Alec Guinness) a chemist invents an indestructible fiber and turns it into a white suit that repels all dirt. Instead of being hailed as a hero, the chemist is vilified by factory owners and factory workers alike for threatening everybody’s livelihood – they rush to suppress the news of the fiber – not unlike the terrorists rushing to suppress the real, moral version of Adam Smith in Wight’s novel Saving Adam Smith.
But is a white suit ever just a white suit? When I mentioned the white suit to friends, they brought up other white suits that came to mind – Colonel Saunders at Kentucky Fried Chicken being the most common. Runner-ups were Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, and Elvis Presley. No one mentioned the Pope or Hillary Clinton. All mentions were white southern American men. As most of the mentions were also literary, I content the white suit emits a strong literary signal.
In recent decades there have been twists on the white suit, as the New York Times’ “The Return of Justin Jones and The White Suit” details. If the white suite stands for a southern gentleman, anybody else wearing it – suffragettes, black men, and Democratic Congresswomen – are making both a comment about that power and claiming the power for themselves. When you wear a white suit, you will be noticed.
I am now thinking of the rhetorical power of using dress deliberately and creatively to signal what you stand for and whom you admire. Who would you signal?
My delightful discussion with Jonathan Wight raises other big recurrent questions: What is a literary sighting? How much of a literary sighting is in the eye of the creator? And how much is in the eye of the beholder?
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