The Financial Lives of the Poets

Starred review from August 31, 2009
National Book Award–finalist Walter does for the nation’s bleak financial landscape what he did for 9/11 in The Zero
: whip-smart satire with heart. Matt Prior quits his job as a business reporter to start Poetfolio.com, a Web site featuring poetry about finance, or “money-lit.” Unsurprisingly, it tanks, and Matt returns to the newspaper, only to be laid off with a meager severance package. Now not only are the Priors in danger of losing their house, but Matt is convinced that his wife, Lisa, is having an affair with an old boyfriend she rediscovered during her lengthy nightly Facebook sessions. With two sons in overpriced Catholic school and his increasingly senile father to support, Matt’s bank accounts dwindle amid his financial planner’s dire predictions (diagnosis: “fiscal Ebola”). When an appealing but illegal moneymaking opportunity presents itself, Matt jumps at the chance. The decision to include snippets of Matt’s poetry in the novel was a risky one, but Walter pulls it off, never resorting to pretension or overused metaphors for life’s meltdowns.

September 15, 2009
A new novel by the Edgar Award-winning author of "Citizen Vince" is cause for celebration; though tedious passages of indulgent free verse threaten to derail an otherwise promising premise, Walter manages to pull it off with zippy dialog and a likable, if extremely flawed, main character. Matt Prior is a former journalist who bailed from his newspaper job to start a misconceived web sitepoetfolio.comfeaturing literary writing about the financial world. Now his web site is floundering, and he has no job prospects in sight. Convinced that his wife's furtive text messages signal an affair with a high school flame and desperate for cash to prevent his mortgage lender from foreclosing on their house, Matt stumbles into an unlikely money-making venture: drug dealer to the middle-aged. Fans of the TV series "Weeds" will not be disappointed. Manic, sleep-deprived, cringe-inducing hilarity ensues as Prior sinks lower and lower toward rock bottom before he finds a glimmer of redemption. VERDICT Prior is a zany, foul-mouthed Willy Loman in search of a stimulus package, and readers looking for some humor with their layoff notices will certainly relate.Christine Perkins, Bellingham P.L., WA

Copyright 2009 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 1, 2009
Unemployed suburban dad teetering on the brink comes up with a high-risk, recession-proof way to get out of debt.

The American Dream, for former newspaper journalist and failed Web entrepreneur Matt Prior, is not living up to its hype. Broke after sinking his savings into poetfolio.com, a website catering to his twin passions for financial advice and free-verse poetry, he owes more on his house than it's worth and has to contend with the knowledge that his sexy wife Lisa is carrying on a virtual affair with her high-school boyfriend Chuck, with whom she reconnected on Facebook. Private-school tuition for his two young sons and the care for his elderly dementia-addled father add to his woes. But as dire as it looks—and sardonic Matt is fully aware of the role he has played in his personal ruin—opportunity emerges in the unlikeliest of places. He meets a couple of local youths at his neighborhood 7-Eleven and, after a surreal evening spent smoking really good marijuana with them, realizes that some businesses are most definitely not hurting in this troubled economy. So he decides to become a 46-year-old pot dealer, selling to other middle-aged, middle-class types. Through his new friends he gets hooked up with a local grow operation called"Weedland" and finds there is definitely a clientele for his high-quality product, which he vows he will only sell until he gets solvent again. Nothing, of course, goes according to plan, and Matt gets to see any remaining black-and-white notions he ever had get obliterated—for his own good. Walter's bitterly funny follow-up to The Zero (2006) could not be more topical in its depiction of a leveraged to-the-hilt culture run amuck, and wiseass Matt makes for a distinctly flawed Everyman running out of chances.

Midlife crisis farce laced with some larger truths about how we live now.

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