Our Little Racket

April 3, 2017
Baker’s ambitious debut focuses on 15-year-old Madison D’Amico and her family during the “shell-shocked” year her father’s investment bank plummets from financial giant to bankruptcy amid rumors of criminal wrongdoing. When his business starts to implode, Brooklyn-born CEO Bob “Silverback” D’Amico relocates to his luxury Manhattan apartment, while back in Greenwich, Conn., his wife, Isabel—previously envied for her elegant taste and old money—tries to remain aloof from a rising tide of gossip and hostility. Isabel’s friend Mina offers comfort with Xanax, and then finds herself among the gossips. Meanwhile, at Greenwich Prep, Bob and Isabel’s daughter, Madison, chooses the company of boyfriend Chip and trouble-seeking Zoe over former BFF Amanda, whose father persists in writing newspaper columns excoriating Madison’s. Alert and sympathetic to Madison’s precarious situation, the D’Amicos’ nanny, Lily, tries to help her charge, but discovers loyalty has its challenges as well as limits. Baker switches perspective among five women (Isabel, Lily, Mina, Madison, Amanda) to create a collage of Greenwich parents, children, and the people paid to manage the parents’ houses and care for their kids. For the Greenwich contingent, there are outsiders and insiders, official and unofficial stories, all teeming with betrayals large and small, accidental and intentional. Baker examines different facets of these betrayals from multiple points of view. As the teenager puzzles out her father’s actions and her mother’s silences, a personal, thought-provoking portrait emerges of the American Dream, complete with a web of visible and invisible cracks in the foundation.

February 15, 2017
The failure of an investment bank is bad news for the family of the CEO.Madison D'Amico, the teenage protagonist of Baker's debut, has been rigorously trained by her mother, Isabel, in the hyperawareness and discipline required of the rich and beautiful: eat grapefruit, say little, trust no one. This conditioning will shape the way she deals with the crisis that jolts her well-cushioned adolescence when her father's investment bank is shut down, with him to blame, and to be charged, for its failure. Over many lugubrious chapters, she and her ice-queen mother will suffer the bottomless, nervy schadenfreude of their Greenwich, Connecticut, community. Also miserable will be the family's nanny, Lily; Isabel's one female friend, Mina Dawes; and Madison's one female friend, Amanda, whose father is the journalist leading the charge against the CEO. After a couple weeks in hiding, D'Amico comes home to hole up in his study and, in a series of late-night conversations, confides the inside story nobody knows to his teenage daughter. Based on a series of epigraphs quoting Richard Fuld of Lehman Brothers--Fuld was called the Gorilla, D'Amico is called the Silverback, etc.--the story mirrors real events. Yet the lifestyles and financial maneuverings depicted all feel generic; if this is an insider's story, it doesn't read like one. There is a bewildering amount of interior monologue from the five main female characters; the most banal conversation is plotted, managed, and second-guessed to a deadening degree, creating endless low-level tension that goes nowhere. On the other hand, potentially interesting plotlines, like the one about the nanny's boyfriend's connection to a wannabe investigative blogger who is stalking Madison, are underdeveloped, then tied hastily in a bow in the final pages. A book that shows just how boring the rich truly are.

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February 1, 2017
When the investment bank Weiss & Partners comes crashing down in 2008, the Greenwich, CT, world of CEO Bob D'Amico gets shaky, too, with teenage daughter Madison among those who begin questioning their roles in the glossy society to which they are accustomed. A big debut; a 100,000-copy first printing.

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