I don't know what you mean by the "American dream narrative".

Globalism does not necessarily negate culture--especially the dominant Western cultures. America's biggest export into the globalized information and capital markets is its Americanism. Until that trend wanes, I don't see how the American dream narrative stops. No doubt the voices and settings will change, but the culture remains.

I think the better angle is the future of the novel form. Is it dying? Is it analogous to theater wherein other technologies are reducing its scope?

I have been living in the globalized tech and capital world, but I have not seen it decrease the American culture. I have, however, seen the tech-part take some bites out of the printed word, even with each year's new fangled e-book.

In the last ten years, however, we've seen the remarkable dissolution of national borders by the flow of information and capital: these days you don't have to station yourself in America, or even take a particular interest in the American consumer, in order to prosper on an 'American' scale. As a result, the traditional preoccupation of American novelists--in essence, to do some kind of justice to the American dream narrative, with all of its assumptions and concerns--threatens to become as anachronistic as Chuck's plan to Americanize cricket.

I wonder if this isn't a bit of an emotional overreaction to a couple of traumatic national events, namely the end of the Cold War and the 9/11 attacks. These kinds of events can provoke anxiety over mortality and impermanence, and the fear of the dissolution of the body. But it this case, we're talking about perceptions of national mortality, impermanence and dissolution.

The end of the Cold War knocked down some of the physical and psychological walls that had established the boundaries of the only world many of us had ever known. That might seem like it should be liberating, but people learn to be comfortable with their walls and boundaries, and destroying them is also a challenge to the senses of national identity and national purpose. If the boundaries disappear, then we start to ask where do we end and others begin? What events are purposeful national actions, and what events are things happening to us? And what if there is no us and them anymore.

A lot of people seemed to oscillate between some extreme reactions: America is now everything, and has spread itself out over the entire world in triumph; or America is now nothing, and has been dissolved into an undifferentiated post-American global mass. The nineties saw the birth of a lot of extreme globomaniacal ideal about the end of history, the end of the state, the dawn of a new age of anarchy and the dawn of the age of the One Market governing all in self-organizing, invisible hand purity, without governments or states playing an important role.

So start with that emotionally diffident or ambiguous situation, and add the trauma of an event like 9/11, where mighty symbols of American form and power literally crumbled to dust, and you get an even more intense anxious reaction. People are seized with an irrational horror of impending national nothingness, they feel the national substance dissolving, and they lash out in a panicky effort to preserve it. They also become freaked out about every leak across the national borders.

Shakespeare was good at capturing this sense of dissolution and insubstantiality, and connected it with loss, failure or declining power. In the Tempest, for example:

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

And also in Antony and Cleopatra:

MARK ANTONY
Eros, thou yet behold'st me?

EROS
Ay, noble lord.

MARK ANTONY
Sometimes we see a cloud that's dragonish;
A vapour sometime like a bear or lion,
A tower'd citadel, a pendent rock,
A forked mountain, or blue promontory
With trees upon't, that nod unto the world,
And mock our eyes with air: thou hast seen
these signs;
They are black vesper's pageants.

EROS
Ay, my lord.

MARK ANTONY
That which is now a horse, even with a thought
The rack dislimns, and makes it indistinct,
As water is in water.

EROS
It does, my lord.

MARK ANTONY
My good knave Eros, now thy captain is
Even such a body: here I am Antony:
Yet cannot hold this visible shape, my knave.
I made these wars for Egypt: and the queen,--
Whose heart I thought I had, for she had mine;
Which whilst it was mine had annex'd unto't
A million more, now lost,--she, Eros, has
Pack'd cards with Caesar, and false-play'd my glory
Unto an enemy's triumph.
Nay, weep not, gentle Eros; there is left us
Ourselves to end ourselves.

Enter MARDIAN
O! thy vile lady!
She has robb'd me of my sword

But, as I said, these are emotional overreactions to the traumas, and don't fully comport with reality. Yes, there is growing interdependence and mobility. But You still need a passport to travel from one country to the next in this world; people can still only vote in some countries and not in others. People are still divided into groups by languages, religions and cultures. And I would also point out that the vaunted new global mobility tends to be confined to a minority of people in the knowledge class. Most Americans don't have the option of moving abroad to work; and even if they have the option, it is just as unthinkable to them as ever.

As far as the American Dream narrative goes, I have never understood what that narrative is. I once took a whole class on the subject. But it seemed to me that the people giving opinions on the American Dream in literature tended to come down on the side of saying that if it was a narrative, and it was written by an American, it was one version of the American Dream narrative. So by that criterion, I would say the American dream narrative is still alive and well.

Wat is dis? A retirement home book club?

Where are Coover, Pynchon, Barth, Delillo, Elkins, T.C. Boyle, Doctorow?

I would guess the last American Dream narrative might have been more of an American Nightmare narrative...Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

It wasn't a 'fictional' work per se, even though the author's memory for the details might not have been completely reliable. It captured the essence of what we have become as a nation...or maybe what we were all along.

"Sympathy? Not for me. No mercy for a criminal freak in Las Vegas. This place is like the army: the shark ethic prevails-eat the wounded. In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity."

The American Dream narrative, whether it takes us through and past the trajectory of a life, always includes a wistful wish, for attachment, for belonging. It is not peculiarly American, most likely, and its origins may go back to the estrangement that takes place when industrialization strains, and breaks, the attachment to the land, and place. Americans are good at talking about this, since the history is shallow, and we blithely abandon place for a job, a relationship, or just to try someplace new (California here I come).

You passage, your book, is the return of the narrative to its proper stage, the world, as the spread of the detachment or ourselves from our roots pervades, and the immigrant dilemma reaches us even in our ancestral homes, making us strangers in a strange land, even in the lands of our birth.

How dizzying it is to look at a place that we lay our cheeks to from the heights of Google, and see that our nurturing, our sad little experiment in attachment to the land, is burnt. Substitute the word alienation for globalization in your passage, and you have the familiar way of referring to the loss that we all know, and that we all seek to repair, unspooling and defending the string that connects us to something, that we fear will part with the next concession we make to change.