Scan barcode
tasmanian_bibliophile's review against another edition
2.0
‘Don’t look back, just keep moving forward.’
A few years before the novel opens, Matthew Prior quit his day job as a financial reporter in order to set up a web site offering financial advice in verse. Alas, poetfolio.com was not a success and returning to the newspaper business wasn’t an option either. The economy has tanked, and here’s middle-aged Matt with no job, no real job prospects and about to lose the family home.
Yes, the American dream has turned into a nightmare for Matt, and he doesn’t just have financial problems. He shares his home with his senile father, his wife Lisa who has a failed entrepreneurial venture of her own, and might be having an affair, and their two sons.
This novel is the story of Matt’s quest to save his marriage, his dreams and possibly his sanity. A trip to the local 7-eleven to buy milk gives Matt a brainstorm which rapidly turns into a headache. Fiscal panic can lead to some poor life choices.
On one level, as a satire of middle-class aspirational living, this novel is funny. On another level, it was irritating: I found that I didn’t care for Matt Prior for most of the novel and found it hard to accept that he could compound poor decision-making with even worse decision-making. However, I think that the story works because so many of us can relate to at least part of the world Matt Prior inhabits.
‘The edge is so close to where we live.’
Jennifer Cameron-Smith
A few years before the novel opens, Matthew Prior quit his day job as a financial reporter in order to set up a web site offering financial advice in verse. Alas, poetfolio.com was not a success and returning to the newspaper business wasn’t an option either. The economy has tanked, and here’s middle-aged Matt with no job, no real job prospects and about to lose the family home.
Yes, the American dream has turned into a nightmare for Matt, and he doesn’t just have financial problems. He shares his home with his senile father, his wife Lisa who has a failed entrepreneurial venture of her own, and might be having an affair, and their two sons.
This novel is the story of Matt’s quest to save his marriage, his dreams and possibly his sanity. A trip to the local 7-eleven to buy milk gives Matt a brainstorm which rapidly turns into a headache. Fiscal panic can lead to some poor life choices.
On one level, as a satire of middle-class aspirational living, this novel is funny. On another level, it was irritating: I found that I didn’t care for Matt Prior for most of the novel and found it hard to accept that he could compound poor decision-making with even worse decision-making. However, I think that the story works because so many of us can relate to at least part of the world Matt Prior inhabits.
‘The edge is so close to where we live.’
Jennifer Cameron-Smith
mistylyn's review against another edition
5.0
Jess Walter has, in short shrift, become my single favorite contemporary author. I was first introduced to his work through his contribution to the series of short stories in the Amazon Warmer cli-fi collection, where he was absolutely brilliant. This innovative novel has only solidified my fan status.
The Financial Lives of the Poets opens with an introduction to Matt, an out-of-work journalist fresh off of a failed business attempt to meld poetry and financial articles in an online format—and in debt up to his eyeballs. The piece then proceeds to chronicle Matt’s desperate, yet hilarious, attempts to save his home, his family and himself. From his first encounter with a group of twenty-something stoners at a 7/11 to his eventual run in with law enforcement, Matt stumbles forward whilst consistently taking two steps back. His less-than-truthful wife, his increasingly senile father and his new weed-smoking friends are all along for the ride and add just enough color to keep the reader from falling into a funk over the existential overtones that don’t reconcile until the bitter end.
The novel moves between chapters, intertwining prose and poetry in a Shakespeare-worthy plot that hovers somewhere between comedy and tragedy. The writing in both formats is beyond genius, as evidenced here, in a passage that left me in awe of this writer’s talent: http://a.co/3FjGtNN.
This is a novel for those who love language and can appreciate a dry wit that is at once self-deprecating and self-indulged. If I could rate this beyond five stars, I absolutely would do so. For now, however, five will have to suffice! If you haven’t yet read Jess Walter, this is the perfect place to start.
The Financial Lives of the Poets opens with an introduction to Matt, an out-of-work journalist fresh off of a failed business attempt to meld poetry and financial articles in an online format—and in debt up to his eyeballs. The piece then proceeds to chronicle Matt’s desperate, yet hilarious, attempts to save his home, his family and himself. From his first encounter with a group of twenty-something stoners at a 7/11 to his eventual run in with law enforcement, Matt stumbles forward whilst consistently taking two steps back. His less-than-truthful wife, his increasingly senile father and his new weed-smoking friends are all along for the ride and add just enough color to keep the reader from falling into a funk over the existential overtones that don’t reconcile until the bitter end.
The novel moves between chapters, intertwining prose and poetry in a Shakespeare-worthy plot that hovers somewhere between comedy and tragedy. The writing in both formats is beyond genius, as evidenced here, in a passage that left me in awe of this writer’s talent: http://a.co/3FjGtNN.
This is a novel for those who love language and can appreciate a dry wit that is at once self-deprecating and self-indulged. If I could rate this beyond five stars, I absolutely would do so. For now, however, five will have to suffice! If you haven’t yet read Jess Walter, this is the perfect place to start.
oedipa_maas's review against another edition
2.0
It's difficult, but not impossible, to write a first-person narrative wherein the protagonist is a total piece of shit and still have your readers sorta kinda (or maybe really) root for him/her.
This is not one of those books. It does not get the worst rating because there were several parts where I actually laughed out loud, but those times were the only saving graces of the whole thing. Not a single well-rounded female character (and all of them are immediately physically commented on but yet to no real effect on the narrative), the plot had a good premise but then fell on its face in the last fifth, the ending was garbage, and I don't think the main character changed at all.
I liked The Zero and may give Walter another chance sometime down the line, but not anytime soon.
This is not one of those books. It does not get the worst rating because there were several parts where I actually laughed out loud, but those times were the only saving graces of the whole thing. Not a single well-rounded female character (and all of them are immediately physically commented on but yet to no real effect on the narrative), the plot had a good premise but then fell on its face in the last fifth, the ending was garbage, and I don't think the main character changed at all.
I liked The Zero and may give Walter another chance sometime down the line, but not anytime soon.
jelisela's review against another edition
2.0
The rambling storytelling was interesting for the first six or seven chapters, but to be honest, I skimmed more than read the last third of the book. It was just so repetitive and boring that I couldn't bring myself to read every word, but at the same time, I wanted to know how it ended, so I guess that's something.
sharonfalduto's review against another edition
A recession era novel, about a man who invested in an internet startup, got cold feet, went back to his newspaper job, lost that job, and is now watching his world unravel as he is about to lose his house and also maybe his wife. Written in a very real tone, I could definitely identify with the protagonist, Matt Prior, even as he made some very poor choices.
jennyshank's review against another edition
4.0
http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/laughing_on_the_way_to_bankruptcy_jess_walters_financial_lives_of_the_poets/C39/L39/
Laughing on the Way to Bankruptcy: Jess Walter’s “Financial Lives of the Poets”
A laid-off newspaper reporter turns to dealing pot in Jess Walter's new novel.
By Jenny Shank, 10-05-09
The Financial Lives of the Poets
by Jess Walter
Harper, 290 pages, $25.99
In his hilarious and timely new novel, Spokane’s Jess Walter explores the maxim that there’s nothing more dangerous than an unemployed man, even though the primary person in danger may be the man himself, as is the case with protagonist Matt Prior. Several years before The Financial Lives of the Poets begins, Matt was a business reporter for a daily newspaper and he decided to pursue his ill-conceived dream: starting a website that reports business news in poetry form. When Poetfolio.com tanked before it was even launched, something that everyone but Matt could see coming, Matt scurried back to his newspaper job. But because he’d left, he lost his seniority at the paper, and was one of the first to be laid off when the paper downsized.
Matt couldn’t afford to lose his job: he’s got an enormous mortgage on a big house, a car payment, a garage full of supposedly collectible crap that his wife purchased in a compulsive shopping binge on eBay, and two non-Catholic young sons who attend Catholic school because the neighborhood public school reminds Matt of Sing-Sing. One evening when Matt has just received a letter from the mortgage company threatening foreclosure in a week, he is becoming increasingly suspicious of his wife’s Facebook conversations with her old high school boyfriend, and his unemployment benefits are about to run out, Matt heads to a 7-Eleven to buy some milk. “Two tattooed white kids in silk sweat suits step to the line behind me and I tense a little, double-pat my wallet,” Walter writes. As Matt walks outside, one of the guys offers him “a hit on a glass blunt.”
Matt refuses at first, but because his resistance is worn down, he agrees when the young men, Skeet and Jamie, ask for a ride to a party. Awash in nostalgia for his college days, Matt eventually samples the weed, which is considerably more potent than what he remembers. Jamie explains its origins in this way: “In this lab in British Columbia? This Nobel Prize dude? He Frankensteined that shit? It’s knock-off, but shit’s still pretty good. They can do whatever they want to it, you know? Make it do a thousand different things to your mind, yo.”
After a long night in the stoners’ company, Matt visits his financial planner who tells him, “unless you’re about to inherit some money, what we’re talking about here is irreversible, fatal. You have fiscal Ebola, Matt.” Matt comes up with the solution to all his problems: he drains his depleted bank account sets himself up as a pot dealer to stressed-out professionals like himself. As the reader guesses, things go downhill from there. Part of the fun of The Financial Lives of the Poets is seeing just how big of a mess Walter can embroil Matt in, and finding out how he’ll get out of it.
Walter’s last novel, 2006’s The Zero, based on his experience ghostwriting a memoir for New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik in the days immediately following the 9-11 attack, was a finalist for the National Book Award. The Financial Lives of the Poets is equally satisfying, but in a different way. Filled with hilarious dialogue and situations, Matt’s loopy internal monologues, and lots of poetry that is pretty bad (as Matt readily admits), The Financial Lives of the Poets sometimes seems like it might spin off into nothing more than a comic farce. But then Walter grounds the story with moments of genuine feeling, such as his portrayal of Matt’s relationship with his live-in senile father, his touching descriptions of the children, or Matt’s desperate love for his straying wife. One of Matt’s stronger poems, “Dry Falls,” describes the place where his dad lived in rural Oregon before his dementia set in. It begins:
Dad’s land is scabbed and pocked
river channels that forgot not to die
couleed ditches and hard veined cracks
of channeled dust in his razored cheeks.
Walter’s portrait of a dying newspaper and the shell-shocked demeanor of the journalists still hanging on there is funny, bitter, and accurate, speaking from the perspective of someone who had a decent view of the demise of the Rocky Mountain News. The Financial Lives of the Poets paints a picture of the farcical existence many Americans had been living, using credit to spend cash like it was Monopoly money. And although this message could come off as a repetitive lecture in another writer’s hands, reading it through Jess Walter’s buoyant voice is a fresh pleasure.
Laughing on the Way to Bankruptcy: Jess Walter’s “Financial Lives of the Poets”
A laid-off newspaper reporter turns to dealing pot in Jess Walter's new novel.
By Jenny Shank, 10-05-09
The Financial Lives of the Poets
by Jess Walter
Harper, 290 pages, $25.99
In his hilarious and timely new novel, Spokane’s Jess Walter explores the maxim that there’s nothing more dangerous than an unemployed man, even though the primary person in danger may be the man himself, as is the case with protagonist Matt Prior. Several years before The Financial Lives of the Poets begins, Matt was a business reporter for a daily newspaper and he decided to pursue his ill-conceived dream: starting a website that reports business news in poetry form. When Poetfolio.com tanked before it was even launched, something that everyone but Matt could see coming, Matt scurried back to his newspaper job. But because he’d left, he lost his seniority at the paper, and was one of the first to be laid off when the paper downsized.
Matt couldn’t afford to lose his job: he’s got an enormous mortgage on a big house, a car payment, a garage full of supposedly collectible crap that his wife purchased in a compulsive shopping binge on eBay, and two non-Catholic young sons who attend Catholic school because the neighborhood public school reminds Matt of Sing-Sing. One evening when Matt has just received a letter from the mortgage company threatening foreclosure in a week, he is becoming increasingly suspicious of his wife’s Facebook conversations with her old high school boyfriend, and his unemployment benefits are about to run out, Matt heads to a 7-Eleven to buy some milk. “Two tattooed white kids in silk sweat suits step to the line behind me and I tense a little, double-pat my wallet,” Walter writes. As Matt walks outside, one of the guys offers him “a hit on a glass blunt.”
Matt refuses at first, but because his resistance is worn down, he agrees when the young men, Skeet and Jamie, ask for a ride to a party. Awash in nostalgia for his college days, Matt eventually samples the weed, which is considerably more potent than what he remembers. Jamie explains its origins in this way: “In this lab in British Columbia? This Nobel Prize dude? He Frankensteined that shit? It’s knock-off, but shit’s still pretty good. They can do whatever they want to it, you know? Make it do a thousand different things to your mind, yo.”
After a long night in the stoners’ company, Matt visits his financial planner who tells him, “unless you’re about to inherit some money, what we’re talking about here is irreversible, fatal. You have fiscal Ebola, Matt.” Matt comes up with the solution to all his problems: he drains his depleted bank account sets himself up as a pot dealer to stressed-out professionals like himself. As the reader guesses, things go downhill from there. Part of the fun of The Financial Lives of the Poets is seeing just how big of a mess Walter can embroil Matt in, and finding out how he’ll get out of it.
Walter’s last novel, 2006’s The Zero, based on his experience ghostwriting a memoir for New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik in the days immediately following the 9-11 attack, was a finalist for the National Book Award. The Financial Lives of the Poets is equally satisfying, but in a different way. Filled with hilarious dialogue and situations, Matt’s loopy internal monologues, and lots of poetry that is pretty bad (as Matt readily admits), The Financial Lives of the Poets sometimes seems like it might spin off into nothing more than a comic farce. But then Walter grounds the story with moments of genuine feeling, such as his portrayal of Matt’s relationship with his live-in senile father, his touching descriptions of the children, or Matt’s desperate love for his straying wife. One of Matt’s stronger poems, “Dry Falls,” describes the place where his dad lived in rural Oregon before his dementia set in. It begins:
Dad’s land is scabbed and pocked
river channels that forgot not to die
couleed ditches and hard veined cracks
of channeled dust in his razored cheeks.
Walter’s portrait of a dying newspaper and the shell-shocked demeanor of the journalists still hanging on there is funny, bitter, and accurate, speaking from the perspective of someone who had a decent view of the demise of the Rocky Mountain News. The Financial Lives of the Poets paints a picture of the farcical existence many Americans had been living, using credit to spend cash like it was Monopoly money. And although this message could come off as a repetitive lecture in another writer’s hands, reading it through Jess Walter’s buoyant voice is a fresh pleasure.
scottkell's review against another edition
1.0
Made it 8 1/2 chapters. Couldn't stand another first person inner monologue about the characters failures.
ken_bookhermit's review against another edition
unfortunately, the first person is not the vibe today.
jeremyhornik's review against another edition
2.0
Started it, didn’t love it, skimmed the second half. Funny and acerbic, but the main character was so awash in self-pity that I got bored, listening to him go over the same stuff over and over. And the plot... middle-aged middle class man loses his job and starts amiably selling drugs... it felt not so fresh? Like, “I’m losing my house and my kids will have to go to a bad school,” is not the motivation I’m looking for in my crime fiction.
*shrug* Not for me, I guess.
*shrug* Not for me, I guess.
knitter22's review against another edition
3.0
I started The Financial Lives of the Poets because I loved Jess Walter's latest novel, Beautiful Ruins, so much. Matt Prior is in the middle of a mid-life crisis, which through his own choices, rapidly escalates to a mid-life catastrophe. He quits his job as a newspaper financial reporter to create poetfolio.com, a web site that combines investment advice and poetry. That goes over as well as a realistic person might predict, but it's also just the tip of the iceberg. Matt's wife is having a text/Facebook/in person affair with a guy from Lumberland after she has filled their garage with crap from eBay and failed to resell it, and his senile father has to move in after losing everything to a stripper. Matt is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy and foreclosure, when he meets Skeet and Jamie one night at the local 7-11. They introduce him to designer marijuana, and Matt gets the brilliant idea to cash in his miniscule 401(k) and use the proceeds to buy and sell marijuana. This is how he will dig himself out of his financial chasm, but this plan also goes as well as a rational person might predict.
Matt is an interesting protagonist, very well-written by Walter. One of the most interesting things about him is that he seems to be quite aware of the financial, emotional, and bureaucratic messes that he (and our society) have made, yet he goes on making increasingly desperate decisions. Walter doesn't write Matt as hapless, so we cheer for his indomitability while shaking our heads at his incompetence. Ordinarily a character like this might irritate me, but Jess Walter's amazing writing made this a pleasure to read. Matt does learn a lesson that we should all take notice of: "The edge is so close to where we live."
Matt is an interesting protagonist, very well-written by Walter. One of the most interesting things about him is that he seems to be quite aware of the financial, emotional, and bureaucratic messes that he (and our society) have made, yet he goes on making increasingly desperate decisions. Walter doesn't write Matt as hapless, so we cheer for his indomitability while shaking our heads at his incompetence. Ordinarily a character like this might irritate me, but Jess Walter's amazing writing made this a pleasure to read. Matt does learn a lesson that we should all take notice of: "The edge is so close to where we live."