The Financial Lives of the Poets: A Novel (Harper Perennial Olive Editions) - Softcover

Walter, Jess

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0062359835 ISBN 13: 9780062359834

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 2014

Synopsis

What happens when small-time reporter Matthew Prior quits his job to gamble everything on a quixotic notion: a Web site devoted to financial journalism in the form of blank verse?

Before long, he wakes up to find himself jobless, hobbled with debt, spying on his wife's online flirtation, and six days away from losing his home. . . . Until, one night on a desperate two a.m. run to 7-Eleven, he falls in with some local stoners, and they end up hatching the biggest—and most misbegotten—plan yet.

About this title

About the Author

Jess Walter is the author of six novels, including the bestsellers Beautiful Ruins and The Financial Lives of the Poets, the National Book Award finalist The Zero, and Citizen Vince, the winner of the Edgar Award for best novel. His short fiction has appeared in Harper's, McSweeney's, and Playboy, as well as The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. He lives in his hometown of Spokane, Washington.

From The Washington Post

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Lisa Zeidner Sonnets about hot stock tips? Haiku about adjustable-rate mortgages? In retrospect, maybe it wasn't such a wise move to bet the farm on a Web site that offers financial advice in verse. Matt Prior, the bumbling narrator of Jess Walter's fifth novel, "The Financial Lives of the Poets," admits as much. If poetfolio.com failed to make him a millionaire, Matt thought he could always get his reporting job back. How could he have known that the newspaper business would tank along with the rest of the economy, leaving him at age 46 with no job, no job prospects and six days left before foreclosure on his house? Financial meltdown isn't the only problem facing the devoted husband and father in this deliciously antic tale of an American dream gone very sour. Matt's senile father lives with him after losing his net worth to a Las Vegas stripper. Matt's two boys are having problems at school. His wife, Lisa, is despondent from her own failed entrepreneurial adventure -- a belly-up eBay resale business that has left them with a garage crammed with dreck. She sneaks to her computer for an Internet affair with the heir to a local store called Lumberland. Walter's previous novel, the crisply hallucinatory "The Zero," escorted readers right into the smoke and mangled metal of 9/11. "The Financial Lives of the Poets" is a lighter-hearted concoction, but as in "The Zero," the surreal surprises keep coming. Unable to sleep amid all his troubles, Matt starts smoking marijuana. After an impromptu confab with some suspicious characters at the 7-Eleven, Matt gets the brainstorm to trade in the remaining tatters of his net worth -- a 401(k) that is beginning "to look more like a 4(k)" -- for enough pot to set up his own dealership and dig himself out of the fiscal ditch. The new enterprise goes about as well as you'd expect. The plot may sound as slight as an episode of "Weeds" -- suburban parent cluelessly enters goofy underworld to maintain status quo -- but Matt is no sitcom dad. Part noir gumshoe, part average Joe, he's a sharp, wide-eyed, soulful observer, with a keen eye for the layers of bureaucracy and doublespeak that surround every enterprise, from real estate to the "perpetual blind stalemate" of marriage. The novel delivers a scathing indictment of our country's character and the "ruined systems" we labor under. "Hell, we don't need bailouts, rescue packages and public works," Matt says. "We need more poets." The poems contained herein are not exactly about to grace the pages of the New Yorker. But they sure are funny. Walter gives us Whitman parodies, drug warning labels in rhyme, poems with titles like "Turns Out There Are Only Four Eskimo Words for Snow, However" and poems about hot moms in parking lots. These verses give the narrative the jangly feeling of manic channel-surfing through our nation's recent history. It's a tricky move to write fiction quite this up-to-the-minute. Today's news can quickly feel like yesterday's newspaper. But Walter, a former journalist, has sharp reportorial instincts and brings us right into the maw of current events without ever seeming like he's writing an op-ed instead of a novel. He keeps us rooted in the perceptions of his befuddled, very likable protagonist. Though the story is peppered with all sorts of giddy, hyper-current references -- Facebook, Wikipedia, not to mention the only poem to mention Costco and NPR in the same stanza -- it also has heart and heft. Matt reserves most of his tender nostalgia not for his teetering marriage, but for the newspaper business itself. The closest thing the novel has to a villain is "the Idi Amin of journalism, the Pol Pot of my newspaper, he whose name cannot be typed without befouling a keyboard": the soulless, selfish, budget-minded manager who fires Matt and kills his paper. "It never occurred to me that a newspaper could die," Matt mourns. By the novel's end, he's learned the lesson of middle-aged mortality the hard way: "The edge is so close to where we live."
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0062359835
• ISBN 13: 9780062359834
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352