Dollartorium ​follows a struggling corndog shop owner who chases a too-good-to-be-true business scheme, only for the fallout to expose the hollow promises of hustle culture. Did this novel begin as satire, social commentary, or character study?

The Dollartorium began as a play, inspired by Aristophanes’ Clouds​, but instead of satirizing philosophers (not much a target these days), I thought better to take on that new class of hustlers and the culture they have created. Like most satire, it became social commentary and, sadly, even more relevant now than when I began.

The Dollartorium scheme feels disturbingly familiar. How closely did you model it on real-world programs? Were you more interested in exposing the scam itself or the conditions that make people vulnerable to it?

Ha! It is disturbingly familiar to me as well. The Dollartorium is a critique of the many ways our culture, especially business culture, creates a numbness in ourselves and in our relationships with others. The Dollartorium​ is more about the cultural threat, the scam itself, but of course, the scam would hardly be a threat if we, like Ralph, weren’t vulnerable to it. Fortunately, Ralph and Phyllis recover with the help of a more reality-grounded Stella.

The novel is funny, but there’s an undercurrent of anger beneath the jokes. How do you balance humor with critique?

Without humor, I’d go mad. The heart of the book is in the lectures at the Dollartorium. I use each lecture to ridicule one thing. If the book revealed the totality of living under the culture of uncontrolled capitalism, it would be humorless​ and unbearable. These little things, from sex in advertising to dilution of food, are pieces we all experience, and up close they are both funny and disconcerting. To see their absurdities enables us to distance ourselves from them a bit. But to be so used, so often, makes me angry.

The book closes on a realistic, not idyllic, note. Why was that the right ending?

I would be gratified if the ending were realistic, that we simply open our eyes and live and work doing what we can as best we can, bearing in mind the needs of others. After a brutal journey for Ralph and his daughter, I hope the ending shows that things do not have to be the way they have become, and that the journey to a saner world is a personal, as well as social, responsibility. Even Phyllis finds pleasure in honest work. Still, the Money Master endures, intent on his own selfish worldview, doesn’t he?

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