“To explain the lives of people living in this moment, to look at the historical forces that are shaping all of us, you have to look at business and technology. In our period, what is it that’s shaping us? I would suggest it’s the long fallout from the 2008 financial crisis and the technology revolution that’s been happening in California.” — Alexander Starritt

How to write a novel about our times? For Alexander Starritt, it means juxtaposing friendship and ambition alongside the grand historical forces of the age. Just as George Eliot did in Middlemarch. Whereas for Eliot, those forces were the 1832 Reform Acts and the industrial revolution, Starritt’s forces are the 2008 financial crisis and the digital revolution.

His novel, Drayton and Mackenzie, longlisted for the Financial Times Business Book of the Year, follows two ambitious Gen X’ers through the first two decades of the twenty-first century. The 2008 crash, Starritt says, ruined the lives of many of his generation. Rather than being in a Gramscian interregnum, our brave new 21st century world is already visible. But in contrast with many progressive critics of our neo-liberalism age, Starritt isn’t apocalyptic about the future. Think of Drayton and Mackenzie as Middlemarch and McKinsey. Revolutions will come and go, but, for Alexander Starritt, friendship and ambition are unchanging.

Five Takeaways

• The First Novel on the FT Business Book List in 15 Years: The Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year longlist typically features books on China, AI, and tech giants. In 2025, for the first time in fifteen years, it included a novel. Starritt’s reading of why: there’s a gap. The literary and cultural worlds have become so estranged from the business world that very few writers are even attempting to write seriously about the forces that actually shape people’s lives. That gap, he says, says as much about the cultural moment as any quality the book itself might have.

• George Eliot’s Method: Historical Forces as the Engine of Fiction: When George Eliot wrote Middlemarch, the historical forces she was dramatising were the Reform Acts and the industrial revolution. Starritt’s equivalent: the 2008 financial crisis and the California tech revolution. His method is Eliot’s — use a closely observed relationship (in his case, a male friendship rather than a marriage) as the engine through which the reader experiences history. The friendship gives the historical canvas an emotional charge. The historical canvas gives the friendship its full weight. Neither works without the other.

• Male Friendship: The Most Important Relationship Nobody Writes About: We’ve all read too many books and seen too many films about romantic and sexual relationships. Starritt’s observation: there is another type of relationship — friendship — that is incredibly important to almost all of us, and that gets almost no literary attention. Drayton and Mackenzie is his attempt to take it seriously. The friendship between James (straight-lined, disciplined, brilliant) and Roland (impulsive, self-sabotaging, charming) evolves from incomprehension to something described by the Financial Times as “unbreakable” — and the reviewer admitted that by the end, their vision wasn’t the clearest.

• The Post-Liberal World Is Already Here: Everyone quotes Gramsci’s interregnum — the old world is dying, the new one hasn’t been born yet. Starritt’s counter: the new world has already been born. You can see it everywhere across the Western world. British jobs for British workers. Reshoring manufacturing. Keeping out undesirable foreigners. There is, he notes, quite a lot of consensus about these things, even if the discourse around them is contested. The post-liberal world is already here. The question is not whether it will arrive but what we do with it.

• European Optimism: The Separation From America May Be for Europe’s Own Good: Starritt’s closing optimism, which he acknowledges may not be welcome news for American listeners: the painful separation from America that America is forcing upon Europe is probably, in the long run, for Europe’s own good. Rather than relying on the White House, Europeans can take responsibility for themselves. David Runciman’s idea: democracy needs to be renewed every generation. The external pressure of China, Russia, and an America that no longer wants to help may be the forcing function that produces that renewal. Maybe we can get some agency back.

About the Guest

Alexander Starritt is a Scottish novelist and entrepreneur. He was born in 1985 and is the author of Drayton and Mackenzie (Atlantic Monthly Press, June 2, 2026), We Germans (winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize), and The Beast (a 2017 Spectator book of the year). He was a founding team member of the policy platform Apolitical. He lives in London.

References:

• Drayton and Mackenzie by Alexander Starritt (Atlantic Monthly Press, June 2, 2026).

• George Eliot, Middlemarch — Starritt’s primary literary model, referenced explicitly.

• Adrian Wooldridge, “Bring Back the Big Business Novel,” Bloomberg — the piece referenced at the opening.

• David Runciman — referenced for his argument about democratic renewal.

• Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay — the Financial Times comparison.

About Keen On America

Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.

Chapters:

(00:31) - Introduction: the FT Business Book longlist and the first novel in 15 years
(02:03) - The gap in culture: literary and business worlds estranged
(02:50) - Adrian Wooldridge: bring back the big business no...