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A review by jennyshank
The Financial Lives of the Poets by Jess Walter
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.