The Financial Lives of Poets by Jess Walter

In the weeks following our move, I indulged in some light reading. I trolled the young adult section for cheesy vampire novels, and even spent a delicious week living vicariously through a romantic historical fiction novel about life on the American frontier. But you can only avoid reality and quality fiction for so long.



I dove back in with The Financial Lives of the Poets by Jess Walter, a sharply written and darkly hilarious novel about this great recession. And it was the perfect way to return to reality. The novel touches upon many of the current hot issues: the mortgage crisis, the death of print media, and the high unemployment rate. These are the topics being discussed in hushed tones at school pick-up and those that keep us up at night. Jess Walter finds a way to address these stressful times, to paint them so perfectly that we can see the humor in the situation and get relief with laughter.





The novel's main character is a pathetic guy named Mathew Prior whose life is crumbling around him, the type of person everyone seems to know, who seems to exist solely to make us feel better about our own situations. He's a laid-off financial reporter who lost most of his investments in the stock market crash thanks to his "stubborn love for financial and media stocks." His home is about to be repossessed by the bank, and his wife spends her nights on the computer, flirting with an old boyfriend, "in search of her better self, pre-child, pre-forty, and pre-me."



When the novel begins, Matthew has six days left before being evicted from his home, but he still has not told his wife. Instead he spends his days in a series of hopeless pursuits, putting off facing reality. He lingers in voicemail limbo with the mortgage company, trying to reach a human with whom to negotiate and new payment plan. He has the same conversation over and over again with this senile father, hoping to help him fight the growing memory loss. The story may seem grim and overwhelmingly depressing, but Walter's caustic observations about our society are so dead on that I couldn't stop reading and found myself laughing aloud.



On the Housing Crisis:

"And my disappointment is not that my own home has lost half its value. What disappoints me is me - that I fell for their propaganda when I knew better, that I actually allowed myself to believe that a person could own a piece of the world when the truth is that anything you try to own ends up owning you. We're all just renting."



On the atmosphere at the newspaper where he used to work:

"The once plucky staff - my old colleagues and friends - now resemble the nervous crew in one of those Alien movies, their numbers shrinking as they look over their shoulders and wait for one of those mean little pink slips to burst from one of their chests."



On garbage:

"It is garbage night in America, the night I glide room to room emptying plastic garbage cans and get the full measure of what's really going on in my family's life. ... Franklin's garbage is like the kid himself, heartbreaking - a half-eaten sneaked sucker thrown away in guilt, a pair of crapped underpants he hoped to hid, a scary picture of a monster he's torn from a book."



Matthew's life takes a turn for the even more absurd one late night at Seven Eleven when he ends up getting stoned with a bunch of  dangerous-looking youths. In the haze of his pot hangover the next day, he spontaneously decides to cash out the rest of his savings to buy the most marijuana possible. Becoming a drug dealer to his staid suburban acquaintances suddenly seems like the only way out of his financial situation.  Beautiful prose and poetry about the local drug scene ensue.



I'm not sure if I managed to convey that The Financial Lives of the Poets is an extremely entertaining and topical read. I guarantee that you'll not only laugh aloud, but you'll also start to see the poetry in the depressing newspaper stories about rising crime, foreclosed homes, and double digit unemployment. I certainly did.



TLC Book Tours is currently hosting a blog tour for the Financial Lives of the Poets. Check out what others thought about the book. I received my review copy as part of the book tour.