In 1976, The Crash of '79 established Paul Erdman as a "brand name" author. He quickly became the leading practitioner of "fi-fi" (financial fiction), a genre that has proliferated like money-market funds as big bucks have come to be an important subject for writers, if not a subject for important writers. The novel's apocalyptic title and awesome topicality overshadowed certain deficiencies that appear to have become incidental to the manufacture of best-selling novels: characterization, language, atmosphere, style. The book was a great popular success; parts of the business community hailed it as a fifth gospel.

The title of Erdman's new novel, The Last Days of America, also incorporates an inviting frisson of disaster. In this case, the apocalypse involves the surrender of American hegemony to a rearmed German Reich….

Among the moral and factual matters discoursed on by the garrulous protagonist are marital fidelity, the nature of patriotism, the...