In the 1970s, due to the Nixon administration’s decision to abolish the gold standard, money entered into an ontological crisis. This crisis has reverberated, via an avalanche of other financial events in the decade and after, all the way into the twenty-first century. In this chapter, I consider various novels (and some films as well) that point to deep philosophical relations between the kinds of questions that money’s post-1970 ontological crisis opens up, and the art of fiction-writing. These relations are especially evident in the tensions between literary realism – exemplified in the field by Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) – and postmodernism, which comes to challenge realism in the early 1970s, exactly when money’s ontological crisis opens up. Whereas the realist project, which has seen a revival after the 2007–8 global market crash, seeks to provide epistemological responses to money’s ongoing crisis – a descriptive and explanatory project that is necessary, even if it may be doomed to failure – post-1970s postmodernism and more experimental fiction are better placed to engage money’s ontological crisis, which has laid bare the ways in which money exceeds what we can know about it and demands a realism that is speculative – like contemporary finance itself.

J. M. Coetzee is often thought a solitary, reclusive figure, but he has long collaborated with other writers and artists. Correspondence and epistolary conventions also play an important role in Coetzee’s fictional work. This chapter argues that we must look beyond the apparent contradiction between Coetzee the private man and Coetzee the collaborator, to understand conflict as central to his pursuit of dialogue. The chapter explores the ways in which writing, reflection, and critique are at the heart of Coetzee’s collaborative work and suggests that these elements are not at odds with his rejection of the demand for immediate, unplanned speech. The chapter provides detailed readings of Coetzee’s works of correspondence, The Good Story and Here and Now, as well as examining his use of epistolary conventions and techniques in his fiction, particularly in Summertime and Age of Iron. The chapter concludes that Coetzee’s commitment to collaboration and correspondence is simultaneously a resistance to producing a single repeatable life-story or superficial exchange, and that just as mediation is necessary to move beyond the stock phrases of epistolary exchange, so errors and disagreements are essential in creating meaningful dialogue.