Debt centers around two lawyers whose lives are becoming defined by the debt they bear as they face the aftermath and lessons learned following a colleague’s tragic suicide. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

The novel is a retelling of Crime and Punishment in the same way The Stranger probably was. The contention being that the moral architecture of the age has started dictating different moral conclusions. The book uses the arcs of murder and prostitution almost allegorically, and I think it was this general theme that drove the plot more than anything else. I saw Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice a couple months after finishing Debt, and that film sort of corroborated the emergence of this new archetype for me. Someone who transgresses a moral boundary and not only feels no direct remorse but whose life gets immeasurably better as a result, and who suffers no consequences. That’s sort of the meditation here. I’m also a corporate attorney.

The voice is frantic, funny, disgusted, and intensely precise. How did you develop that tone?

I wrote another novel, – -, where the narrator of Debt is the main character. The world of that novel is more straightforwardly absurd, so when Wade is situated in a world that’s ostensibly “normal,” it’s like he’s still suspended in that absurdity. He approaches the world of Debt as if it were its own Invisible City, and I think that’s where the tone comes from. This place is pretty absurd if you think you’re only visiting.

How did you balance empathy for Bill and K with the satire directed at their choices and ambitions?

That’s a good question. It’s very true that Bill and K are representatives of one of the least sympathetic classes in our society, the HENRYs. It’s also true that their situation is almost entirely self-inflicted. What do they have to complain about, really? The book leans into this some. On another level, their problems and their misery are kind of a way of saying that it doesn’t get better for anybody. Like that Malvina Reynolds song, “and there’s doctors, and there’s lawyers and business executives,” but even they can’t get a little box anymore. There’s a disgruntled entitlement and a pessimism that make the book possible. We forget to pray for the HENRYs, and so the HENRYs forget to pray for us.

If readers finish the novel haunted by one thing beyond the satire — the romance, the exhaustion, the fear, or the compromises — what do you hope lingers most?

Debt is a tax imposed by the capital class on the cost of social mobility. If you feel like you’ve been disappointed for so long that you’ve forgotten an alternative, at least you’re not alone. It’s not a hallucination. Things have gotten worse. They are getting worse. There are intractable logics at the core of our systems that we both suffer and enforce. And if you can find a way to fall in love and get married, then you should.

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