The Index of Self-Destructive Acts

Starred review from March 1, 2020
An affluent New York family is flung into a tailspin in 2009 in the third novel by Beha (Arts and Entertainments, 2014, etc.). Beha is the editor of Harper's, and this story evokes the spirit of two famous essays the magazine published championing the social novel: Tom Wolfe's "Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast" and Jonathan Franzen's "Why Bother?" Its young hero, Sam, has arrived from Wisconsin to write about the intersection of hard data and news for a storied publication. The job introduces him to the Doyle family, whose patriarch, Frank, is a longtime baseball writer and political pundit who recently disgraced himself making racist comments about Barack Obama on air at a Mets game. Doyle's wife, Kit, is an investment banker pummeled by the Great Recession; their son, Eddie, is an Iraq War vet who's overly enchanted with a street preacher, and their daughter, Margo, is making little progress on her dissertation on Wordsworth. The Doyles give Beha ample opportunity to expound on media, sports, religion, war, finance, and the arts; Justin, a black hedge fund manager noblesse-obliged by the Doyles, is a pathway to riff on race while Sam's wife, Lucy, lets him explore marriage. The novel can feel a tick too orderly, as Beha carefully maintains his large cast and big themes. But each character is engaging and full-blooded, and Beha pushes them hard: He's concerned with how irrationality worms its way into everybody's lives (via infidelity, faith, insider trading, plagiarism, addiction) and how that irrationality can undermine us and push us closer to understanding ourselves. "We hated nothing more than indisputable evidence, because we wanted to dispute," Beha writes. And though the novel's tone is more intellectual than what Wolfe and Franzen prescribed, its breadth, ambition, and command are refreshing. An admirably big-picture, multivalent family saga.

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April 13, 2020
In this gripping family saga, Beha (The Whole Five Feet) sets a cast of New Yorkers on a path to ruin during the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. Sam Waxworth is a data journalist who has become famous for the program he designed that accurately predicted much of the 2008 election results, including Obama’s meteoric rise to the presidency. As a result, he is offered a plum job at Interviewer magazine in New York and leaves his wife in Wisconsin, where she is finishing her last year of special education study. After his first articles for the publication go viral, he’s assigned to write a profile of Frank Doyle, a disgraced, left-wing–turned–right-wing political opinion writer. As Sam conducts his reporting, he becomes enmeshed with the Doyle family. Kit, Frank’s wife, is reeling from the collapse of her private investment bank. Eddie, their son and an Army veteran, suffers from PTSD after having served in Iraq. And Sam starts up a romantic relationship with 23-year-old Margo, Eddie’s sister and an aspiring academic, just as his wife decides to pay Sam a visit from Wisconsin. Filled with stunning acts of hubris and betrayal, Beha’s deliciously downbeat novel picks apart the zeitgeist, revealing a culture of schemers and charlatans. This cutting send-up of New York progressive elitism should do much to expand Beha’s audience.

May 1, 2020

New York, April 2009. The recently imploded economy is struggling to recover. Self-proclaimed prophet Herman Nash stands on a fountain in Washington Square and declares that the world will end on November 1. Nash's frequent rants go viral on the social media platform Teeser, owned by billionaire Mario Adrian, who gives Max Blakeman, editor of Adrian's gossipy magazine, Interviewer, free rein to lure Madison, WI, baseball-turned-political data analyst phenom Sam Waxworth to the city for a high-paying job. Waxworth is to blog on Teeser and write an in-depth piece on disgraced political columnist Frank Doyle, who cratered his decades-long career with a drunken racist comment about President Obama. Meanwhile, Doyle's son Eddie has little interest in his trust fund, daughter Margo sets her sights on married Sam, and wife Kit feels cornered by an extraordinarily bad decision. As the lives of these and other characters become further entwined and compromised, Nash's wild rantings look more prophetic than any data-driven prediction Waxworth could ever have imagined making. VERDICT Harper's Magazine editor Beha (Arts & Entertainments) brings to messy life a post-9/11 New York City in a character-rich novel that's funny, poignant, prescient, and somehow sweetly deft in the willing suspension of disbelief as a syzygy of coincidences careens toward a perfect storm.--Beth Andersen, formerly with Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI

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