The Financial Lives of the Poets
Release date: 2009 / 290 pages
Synopsis (from the back cover): 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.
First Sentence: Here they are again — the bent boys, baked / and buzzed boys, wasted, red-eyed, dry-mouth / high boys, coursing narrow bright aisles / hunting food as fried as they are, twitchy / hands wadding bills they spill / on the counter, so pleased and so / proud, as if they’re the very / inventors of stoned –
Review: Please do not evaluate this novel based on the synopsis or first line above! This novel is actually a delightful joy ride. I cannot discuss the plot in this review since discovering the choices that lead the protagonist through his journey is a huge part of the fun. Reading this novel (devoured in two days) was like the first time on Mister Toad’s Wild Ride — surprising, original, careening out-of-control, yet knowing no real harm will come to the reader or to the very likeable characters.
Walter’s wit is marvelously entertaining and surprising, as are the occasional lines from poetry he incorporates at just the right moment. William Carlos Williams and Elizabeth Bishop pop up when least expected, but in thoroughly accessible, unpretentious disguises. And have no fear if you are not well-versed in verse, this is certainly not a prerequisite for this novel — just one more happy surprise.
What grounds the unpredictable narrative is how utterly believeable the characters are — taken from our own lives, but placed in strange, unsettling circumstances completely of their own making.
In the supplemental readings at the end of the novel, the author describes the inspiration for Poets without spoiling any of the surprises:
“…Maybe I should write a book about 7-Eleven. Maybe that’s how you get at America, not through fractured surrealism, but through munchies and Slurpees, through overpriced milk and a big-ass 72-ounce Sprite at two in the morning. So… that’s what I did. Then the economy started cracking and shaking around me, and my friends and relatives began losing jobs and having their lives eroded out from under them; house began going back to banks and those banks began failing and I saw that my 7-Eleven book was actually about that, as if every secret, every hypocrisy, every clue to our consumer culture lay in the overpriced, snack-filled aisles of a convenience store… I had this image of the social or cultural novelist as a detached bystander who usually comes across the scene of an accident after the fact and tries to reconstruct what happened based on the wreckage, the skid marks, the injuries… And I thought: what if instead of re-creating it later, I just stick my head out the window and describe what I see as we go barreling off the road?”
What he doesn’t include above is just how darn funny the result is — and how beautifully hopeful and optimistic, too. Much of Walter’s humor is contextual — he creates fully realized, extremely likeable characters within the span of a few pages and then spins his wit off and around them. But I can include one example of Walter’s humor, describing a Home Depot-like warehouse, that requires no context:
“It is cold inside this big warehouse store; the ceilings must be thirty feet high. Each narrow aisle is stacked nearly to the rafters with boards and posts and dowels and bags of concrete and plywood and doors and window sashes. The effect of all this scale is to shrink the people in here and I feel like a leprechaun, a tiny sprite come to this mystical woodland to shop among giants for a place to store my magical beans for the winter.”
So, if you are looking for a timely, hopeful, quirky, page-turning, character-driven novel to devour a few hours, leave me a comment and I’ll choose a winner soon!
For other reviews, check out the following sites:
Tuesday, September 7th: The Lost Entwife
Thursday, September 9th: nomadreader
Monday, September 13th: Bibliofreak
Tuesday, September 14th: A Bookish Way of Life
Tuesday, September 21st: Bibliophiliac
Monday, September 27th: Rundpinne
Tuesday, September 28th: The Bluestocking Society
Wednesday, September 29th: Life in the Thumb
Tuesday, October 5th: Chefdruck Musings
Wednesday, October 6th: Justice Jennifer Reads
Tuesday, October 12th: You’ve GOTTA Read This!
Tuesday, October 12th: Booklover Book Reviews
Wednesday, October 13th: Book Club Classics!
Thursday, October 14th: Eleanor’s Trousers
Monday, October 18th: Life Is A Patchwork Quilt
Tuesday, October 19th: BookNAround
Wednesday, October 20th: Eclectic/Eccentric
Thursday, October 21st: Nonsuch Book
Friday, October 22nd: Books in the City
I’m so glad you enjoyed this book! I’ve had it since it was released in hardcover, I’ll get to it at some point!
Pick me please…it sounds like a great read:)
I love that you say not to judge this on the first sentence or the plot summary – it seems like one of those books where you simply need to suspend your judgment until you finish reading it. So glad you enjoyed it – thanks for being a part of the tour!
This sounds very interesting. It is something a little different from what I usually read. As usual, great review.
Thanks for the chance.