This month marks the twentieth anniversary of the publication of my first novel, The Rent Collector, released in November 2005. I wish I could say I’m excited. I’m not. Not because my publisher hasn’t offered to bring out a twentieth-anniversary edition — the book went out of print a decade ago — but because publishing itself now feels almost like an anachronism. The novel lives on as an e-book, half the price of the original paperback, destined to be sold digitally in perpetuity.
What I feel instead of excitement is a kind of unease. Looking back, I realize the novel seems to have intuited something that was coming, though I couldn’t have known it then. The story follows a property manager in a worn industrial building in Montreal’s garment district — an ultra-Orthodox Jew temperamentally unsuited to his trade. Rent collection, in the book, becomes a metaphor for indebtedness — not only financial but existential.
At the time, I was reading Emmanuel Levinas, whose philosophy of “infinite responsibility” described indebtedness as the very foundation of the ethical self: an obligation not chosen but inherited. We are born, he said, already indebted — to our parents for giving us life, but also for everything else we have, our language, our culture, our heritage, our traditions, our community, our world. To exist is to owe.
In The Rent Collector, that sense of debt takes both physical and spiritual form. Physically, it’s represented by the building the protagonist manages — a literal inheritance from his father, to whom he owes not just his life but his livelihood. Spiritually, it’s his debt to the soul and to God. The rent collector seeks to repay that spiritual debt by finding meaning in the mundane rhythms of work — in encounters with the tenants, the decaying infrastructure, and the declining industry. “Life is rented,” he muses to himself, which echoes one of my grandfather Sam’s favorite refrains: “The banks own everything.”
I won’t claim the novel foresaw the future. But sometimes writers absorb the undercurrents of the zeitgeist before they break the surface. What I see now is that the world my rent collector inhabited has metastasized into a broader condition — what one commentator I follow, The Functional Melancholic, calls “modern techno-feudalism.”
Today, more people than ever live on borrowed time and borrowed money. They own nothing of enduring value and will likely never be able to. They live by subscription — to housing, to entertainment, even to the means of making a living. The bottom fifty percent rent from the top one. My generation, for the most part, still lives off the remnants of inherited stability; the next faces digital indentured servitude — a kind of techno-sharecropping in the gig economy.
The symbol of this dystopian future came to me this week when Trump floated the idea of a 50-year mortgage — a plan announced not long after he toasted martinis with billionaires at a Great Gatsby-themed party at Mar-a-Lago, while SNAP benefits, which feed an astonishing 42 million Americans, teetered on the edge of cuts.
Twenty years after The Rent Collector, more and more people can barely afford rent, let alone dream of ownership. My protagonist’s struggle to collect back rent from tenants on the cusp of bankruptcy now seems almost quaint beside the moral and economic bankruptcy of our age.
So no — I don’t feel much like celebrating.
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