A satire about kin, and the financial crisis we’re in

December 13, 2009|Alec Solomita, Globe Correspondent

In all likelihood, the definitive book about the global financial meltdown is yet to come and will be written by, say, a Larry Summers or a Robert Samuelson, but the funniest is already available at your bookstore.

Jess Walter’s novel “The Financial Lives of the Poets’’ tells the tale of the unemployed, over-mortgaged, former journalist, fledgling poet, and failed entrepreneur Matt Prior. Free-falling through the financial crisis without a parachute, Prior is also contending with a possibly straying wife with a penchant for manic buying episodes, a father with dementia, and two little boys developing antisocial tendencies. And worse, he has mostly himself to blame for his economic predicament. He left his job as a business writer two years before to pursue an unlikely dream: “I know it sounds stupid in hindsight, and perhaps in foresight too, but my idea was that someone needed to start a website that gave financial news and advice . . . in verse.’’

Here, for instance, is a story titled “Airline Deal Proposed’’: “Buffeted by fuel costs soaring/ and with labor costs surging/ Delta and Northwest are exploring/ the possibility of merging.’’

Building his ill-conceived website - poetfolio.com - “turned out to take longer and be more costly than we thought, and we found ourselves taking another line of credit on the house, going deeper in debt. Then came Lisa’s abnormal online shopping binge, and our credit cards rolled over on us a couple of times and the car payments lapsed and the ground began slipping away.’’

When we meet Prior buying milk after midnight at a 7-Eleven, he has “scrambled back to my old newspaper job, only to get laid off eight weeks ago.” He also needs to come up with an impossible sum within days to block foreclosure proceedings.

Unlike his business venture, the novel lifts off like a rocket as the late-night milk run turns out to be Prior’s rendezvous with destiny - in the form of “two dope smoking bangers in track suits.’’ Recounted in manic, supple, overheated prose, the tale of our previously law-abiding hero spins (plausibly, mind you) into a whole new world of gangsters, lurid lawyers, drug deals, dissembling, and revenge. And for the reader, Prior’s wild “lost weekend’’ becomes a found treasure. As the confused protagonist bounces among the personae of concerned father, fearful husband, and surprisingly ingenious drug dealer, the grateful reader ricochets between anxious empathy and helpless laughter.