“The Financial Lives of the Poets” by Jess Walter
I meant to read Jess Walter’s Financial Lives of the Poets for one of my book groups last year (or the year before, or the year before that; hard to say), but I couldn’t manage it, and didn’t get around to it by the time this year’s Tournament of Books happened, where Walter’s Beautiful Ruins was a candidate, so I ended up reading (and loving) that before this earlier one that had been sitting on my shelf. I attended a recent reading he did here in town, and that spurred me to have another go.
This is a WMFU novel, an acronym from the comments of this year’s Tournament of Books: White Male F-Up. Kind of like a bildungsroman, just taking place in a man’s thirties or so rather than in his teens. it reminded me a lot of another WMFU novel that I enjoyed, Jonathan Tropper’s This is Where I Leave You.
Here, Matt Prior the protagonist is married but having trouble financially and with his wife. This novel is firmly situated in the wake of the housing crash of last decade, and it explores what happens when balloon payments on shifty mortgages suddenly come due. But it’s a comedy, and so there are many different elements that get tossed in: infidelity, pot smoking, drug dealing, parenting, and more. I will never be able to think of the phrase “make good choices” in quite the same way. It was a fast fun read, with some laugh out loud moments. Recommended, though not as highly as Beautiful Ruins.