The other day I attended a reading by the Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai. The venue was Housing Works, a charity bookstore in New York's SoHo. The 58-year-old author is, it's fair to say, relatively unknown in the English-speaking world. His first novel, Sátántangó (the third of his works to be translated by the poet George Szirtes), written in the 80s, has just appeared in a handsome edition published by New Directions press. He deals in despair and metaphysical stasis, one part Kafka, one part Beckett, plus a dollop of earthy comedy. In the film world he has received acclaim for his collaborations with the director Béla Tarr, whose work (including a seven-hour adaptation of Sátántangó) often attracts the adjective "uncompromising". In short, this wasn't the sort of event where you'd expect to have to arrive an hour early to get a seat.

The venue was crammed. People were jostling for position on the floor, on the stairs. The crowd was overwhelmingly young, interspersed with a few visible Hungarian emigrés (elderly, formally dressed, disgruntled at the mob scene) and one or two poorly groomed men carrying those bulging, faintly sinister plastic bags that for some reason are the mark of the obsessive cinéaste, the characters who never miss a screening at Anthology Film Archives, and whose London cousins are, at this very minute, loudly shushing someone talking through the credits at the BFI.

When Krasznahorkai turned up, escorted by his interviewer, the critic James Wood, he stood on stage to receive a protracted round of applause, which he absorbed genially, turning and bowing slightly, his hands steepled in a vaguely clerical gesture you usually only see from Indian politicians or high-ranking organised criminals on HBO.

Krasznahorkai spoke in English, a language he used lyrically, if not always comprehensibly, informing the enraptured audience that his famously long, convoluted sentences are completely conceptualized in his head before he writes them down, and offering the opinion that the full stop "doesn't belong to human beings, it belongs to God", which is why he doesn't much care for paragraph breaks. There were cellphone cameras. There was a flurry of excited social media postings, several by me. For an hour, the assembled New York book scene bathed in the presence of a writer who Susan Sontag once termed "the contemporary Hungarian master of the apocalypse".

The thing about New York (and, a fortiori, the gentrified bits of Brooklyn, where writers go when their Manhattan apartments are expropriated by the One Percent) is that it doesn't have a "contemporary master of the apocalypse". It has post-Ivy relationship anatomists, adderall-enhanced pop culture essayists, dirty realist white-guy novelists and hipster poets who transcribe their sexts and cut them up with Wikipedia entries on HPV and Jersey Shore. It has, at the last count, 247 trillion recent MFA graduates, at least a dozen of which are to be found, on any given morning, abseiling down the glassy exterior of the Random House publishing building, in an attempt to get Sonny Mehta to read their collection of short stories modelled on Denis Johnson's Jesus's Son.

The energy of the New York book scene is undeniable. There's a flourishing ecology of small presses, literary journals, readings and lectures. There is a glut of talented, technically gifted writers and editors. There is also a pervasive undercurrent of financial anxiety, and a sense (at least among the minority who can raise their heads from A Visit from the Goon Squad for long enough to remember the existence of the non-Anglophone literary world) that, for all the action, there's something middlebrow about much of the work that is being hailed as evidence of a New York (or God forbid, a "Brooklyn") literary renaissance. This is a milieu that, for every Don Delillo (whose apocalypse-mastery is undeniable), produces several Jonathan Franzens or Chad Harbachs – conservative stylists whose technical gifts are harnessed to a kind of domestic realism, which eschews metaphysical or existential flights in favour of pragmatic, reader-friendly observation. It is a kind of triangulation between the demands of the critics and the market that feels, to many, less ambitious and confrontational than the work being made elsewhere in the world.

This is why, every so often, the city's twentysomething literary crowd falls in love with a foreign writer, who for a period becomes a sort of talisman, a sign that their aspirations go higher than the current domestic-realist model will allow. When I arrived in 2008, that writer was the Chilean Roberto Bolaño, whose book The Savage Detectives is filled with unrecognised writers, mostly poets, who lead ascetic, semi-nomadic lives and argue fiercely, not about advances or reviews, but art. They are writers who set their own terms, whose passion is uncompromised by the market (which ignores them) and whose poverty and isolation lend their petty squabbles a kind of beat holiness. One evening Bolaño's US publisher threw a party for the launch of his posthumous masterpiece 2666 at a bar in the East Village. By 8.30pm there was a line of vintage-clad young people half-way down the block. It was a shock to me: most London launch parties for fiction in translation (particularly when the author is dead) consist of a few middle-aged academics standing around drinking warm white wine in an atmosphere of remainder-bin purgatory.

Krasznahorkai fits the romantic model less well than Bolaño, but his undoubted seriousness and difficulty mean that this summer, a copy of Sátántangó slung casually on the cafe table is the local masonic sign of literary ambition. It's easy to mock the literary kids – for their whiteness, their inherited privilege, their current habit of dressing in tweeds and 60s dresses, as if the boys are channelling Lionel Trilling and the girls mid-period Sontag – but their hunger adds an urgency to their search for authentic literary heroes. They are entering the scene at a moment when the future seems ever less certain. They are burdened by unprecedented levels of student debt, and as the publishing industry mutates, it's far from clear that when the music stops, most will be able to have the New York life with the job and the apartment and some minimal level of health insurance that, 30 years ago, they would have assumed was their right. These same conservative-looking graduates are among the most active in the Occupy movement, which has focused young New Yorkers on the fact that they are likely to be less wealthy and secure than their parents, and will inherit a society that's more polarised and unequal than at any time since the first world war.

Odd as it may seem, the utopian yearning for an authentic literary culture is part of a growing current of opposition to the status quo. It's embyronic and confused – and New York's insane cost of living may yet move the centre of gravity elsewhere – but an interest in Hungarian fiction may signal much more than meets the eye.