The Financial Lives of the Poets
by Jess Walter
List Price: $14.99
Pages: 320
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 9780061916052
Publisher: Harper Perennial
A few years ago, small-time finance journalist Matthew Prior quit his day job to gamble everything on a quixotic notion: a Web site devoted to financial journalism in the form of blank verse. When his big idea --- and his wife’s eBay resale business --- ends with a whimper (and a garage full of unwanted figurines), they borrow and borrow, whistling past the graveyard of their uncertain dreams.
One morning Matt wakes up to find himself jobless, hobbled with debt, spying on his wife’s online flirtation, and six days away from losing his home. Is this really how things were supposed to end up for me, he wonders: staying up all night worried, driving to 7-Eleven in the middle of the night to get milk for his boys, and falling in with two local degenerates after they offer him a hit of high-grade marijuana?
Or, he thinks, could this be the solution to all of my problems?
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1. Given their different ages and social worlds, what explains Matt Prior’s willingness to befriend Jamie and Skeet at the local 7-Eleven?
2. How does Lisa Prior’s past experience with financial insecurity impact her feelings about Matt as they weather their current money crisis?
3. What does Matt hope to achieve by seeking out Lisa’s current flirtation, Chuck Stehne, and to what extent does he succeed?
4. What does Matt’s vision for online investment poetry, poetfolio.com, represent to him, and why does he connect its failure to his own personal shortcomings?
5. What does Matt’s decision to keep his nascent drug dealing a secret from Lisa reveal about the state of his marriage?
6. How would you characterize Matt’s feelings about his mostly senile father?
7. How does Matt relate his and Lisa’s obsession with their house to the wider cult of home ownership during the housing bubble?
8. Why does Matt reveal the truth of his identity as a confidential informant to Bea?
9. To what extent do Dave’s and Monte’s reactions to Matt’s becoming a confidential informant for the police seem atypical of most druglords?
10. How did you interpret the final line of the novel: “And Lisa and me --- we’re okay.”? To what extent do you read that line as ambiguous.
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"A deliciously antic tale of an American dream gone very sour...part noir gumshoe, part average Joe, [Matt Prior] is a sharp, wide-eyed, soulful observer, with a keen eye for the layers of bureaucracy and doublespeak...The novel delivers a scathing indictment of our country’s character and the ‘ruined systems’ we labor under."
— Washington Post
"Would be so sad if it weren’t so funny, and so funny if it weren’t so sad. . . . Compassionate, witty and drawn from today’s heartless world, it’s a terrific book."
— Arizona Republic
"An extremely funny novel…a very smart meditation on what’s gone wrong with both the US economy and those of us who are expected to keep it running…You may guffaw as you read, but you also share the aching comprehension that Matt Prior is simply a likable everyman, swamped by an economy and an anything-goes, play-now-pay-later society…cleverly designed and immensely entertaining."
— Christian Science Monitor
"The funniest way-we-live-now book of the year."
— Time Magazine
