The Wagers

November 4, 2019
Luck (and the lack of it) is the subject of this quirky work from Michaels (Us Conductors). At 36, Theo Potiris is a struggling stand-up comedian, despite one appearance on Conan. He works in his parents’ grocery store and plays the local comedy clubs on open-mic nights. Then, one day, he takes his 13-year-old niece, Hanna, to the track, where she wins $4 million on her first pick. This rocks Theo’s world to the point where he quits his job in favor of employment with the Rabbit Foot, a consortium of scientists who are attempting to quantify luck and monetize it. Then, he meets a woman named Simone who recruits him for the No Name Gang, which attempts to steal luck from those who hoard it. As part of this gang, Theo helps hijack luck from novelist Daniel Merrett Leys, author of The Labrador Sea, and billionaire businessman Z. Largo, with ever increasing risk of arrest or betrayal. What starts out as a fairly realistic drama eventually morphs into a surreal caper, with luck as an actual commodity to be prized—though to what end is never made entirely clear by the author. Some readers will be overwhelmed by the whimsy of the story, while others will enjoy Michaels’s unflagging imagination.

November 15, 2019
A quiet part-time comedian leaves his family grocery business to try his luck at what turn out to be two bizarre pursuits in this thoughtful, offbeat novel. Every Friday, Theo Potiris goes to the racetrack and places a bet to see how his luck is holding before deciding whether or not he should take the stand-up stage or go home to his apartment above his family's old supermarket, Provisions K. This unprepossessing Greek Jewish Quebecois on the brink of middle age is the protagonist of Michaels' (Us Conductors, 2014) second novel. With his girlfriend, Lou, on a retreat in a distant desert, Theo emerges from his cocoon into two odd worlds of adventure. Prompted by his mother's death and his young niece's massive win while under his care at the racetrack, Theo finds his gateway to novelty is a trio of Italian French-Canadian sisters and a weather-obsessed statistician named Matisse. Matisse works for one of the sisters, who has built up an empire founded on a computer algorithm that makes money betting that it can predict the future better than the bookies. After a short spell working with them, Theo leaves to join the other two sisters, who are part of a criminal gang that steals luck worldwide. Luck looks like and is forensically indistinguishable from sand but makes the owner lucky. Despite these characters of slippery panglobal provenance, a paranoid millionaire, a mysterious billionaire, and some thrilling action in Taiwan, Michaels maintains a calm, quiet tone for Theo that's "neither panicky nor proud." Theo mentions the work of Paul Auster, and this book feels like an homage to The Music of Chance--with its strange biographical tangents and theme of fortune. We see glimpses of the comedy, but sadly, though Michaels was himself an occasional onstage comedian, we never quite see the philosophical insight he claims for Theo's comedy. Our hero is, in the end, inscrutable in ways that are psychologically convincing but narratively unsatisfying. Constantly fascinating but never quite remarkable.

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November 15, 2019
In Michaels' follow-up to the multiaward-winning Us Conductors (2014), Theo Potiris is a Montreal comedian whose career peaked six years ago when he appeared on Conan. He is now struggling for stage time, writing longing letters to his girlfriend on the other side of the world, and working at the family grocery store. After a tragedy rocks the family's foundation, Theo attempts to keep one particular tradition going and takes his 13-year-old niece, Hanna, to place a bet. After she wins big, Theo, a man who loves to gamble, questions how he has led his life and begins to take chances and make changes. First, he starts working at an analytics company that seeks to quantify every act into profitable data; then Michaels' wonderfully constructed narrative takes a dramatic turn as Theo joins a group who trades in luck in an even more mysterious manner. In this delightfully protean tale that shifts among many styles, Michaels queries and pushes against our obsession with quantifying all experience as analyzable data. A wistful and wondrously inventive novel.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)