The Spectre of Austerity in Up Lit: Mike Gayle’s All The Lonely People (2020) and Gail Honeyman’s Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine (2017)

Since 2010, successive Conservative-led governments in the United Kingdom have implemented austerity, cutting billions of pounds from the welfare state. These measures have adversely impacted disabled people, entrenched regional health inequalities, and exacerbated public health issues such as loneliness, drug addiction, and homelessness. While fictional counternarratives have emerged to expose the human consequences of welfare reform, this article focuses on a different creative response to contemporary austerity Britain: the burgeoning genre of up lit. Up lit has been marketed as a panacea, promising to temporarily reassure readers who seek imaginative worlds of comfort and hope in the contemporary moment of uncertainty. However, as my analysis of Mike Gayle’s All The Lonely People (2020) and Gail Honeyman’s Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine (2017) reveals, beneath the seemingly progressive representations of marginalised protagonists and celebrations of community support, lies an emphasis on the neoliberal value of individual responsibility which works to conceal the harmful impact of austerity policies. Both novels celebrate “deserving” citizens who overcome adversity and take responsibility for their health and wellbeing while offering individual acts of kindness as the solution in the absence of state support. Paying close attention to the peripheral characters who are excluded from the central recovery narratives, I conclude that austerity haunts these up lit texts and cannot be contained within their hopeful neoliberal fantasies.