Stocks & Bongs

The Financial Lives of the Poets
by Jess Walter
2009, Harper Collins


After reading The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake I was in pretty desperate need of something to read that was far less emotionally taxing. I had recently been wandering around the Andover Public Library and recalled the title of a book that had been recommended to me by a childhood friend. With blurbs on the jacket from both Sam Lipsyte and Sarah Vowell, I correctly assumed this novel would not be particularly heavy lifting.

The Financial Lives of the Poets is as much about dashed hopes as it is about the insidious reach of the financial crisis. The premise of the book is that Matthew Prior, a former journalist, has discovered his quirky website offering financial advice in meter has gone under. His house is being foreclosed on and he cannot find another job.

Prior goes out for milk at a 7-Eleven (amusingly written as "7/11" throughout the book as reference to his mother's conflation of terrorist attacks and slurpees) and winds up getting stoned. From there, he cashes out his retirement account and intends to buy a large quantity of pot and sell it to make a livelihood (a la Weeds) but things go comically awry.

The book is quite funny. There are numerous half-formed sketches of poetry that supplement the narrative - villanelles, haiku, etc. - and enormous comedy provided by his senile father who pines for chipped beef and The Rockford Files and the lawyer-cum-drug dealer who makes Matthew sign amusingly vague contracts before purchasing marijuana.

Throughout the book, Prior smokes a lot of pot and reflects on his Job-like lot in life. These are characterized by the sort of abstract yet oddly discerning thought processes that accompany large quantities of marijuana. To wit:

So I make one phone call, and just like that, we're eating pizza at 6:30. What is this world? You tap seven abstract figures onto a piece of plastic thin as a billfold, hold that plastic device to your head, use your lungs and vocal cords to indicate more abstractions, and in thirty minutes, a guy pulls up in a 2,000-pound machine made on an island on the other side of the world, fueled by viscous liquid made from the rotting corpses of dead organisms pulled from the desert on yet another side of the world and you give this man a few sheets of green paper representing the abstract wealth of your home nation, and he gives you a perfectly reasonable facsimile of one of the staples of the diet of a people from yet another faraway nation.

And the mushrooms are fresh.

Despite the humor, The Financial Lives of the Poets has a fairly dark core. Prior's wife has been conducting an overture to an affair via facebook and the economic recession taints not only Prior's rather cynical outlook but nearly every page of the book, adorning the humor with a rather sharp edge.

As Prior's narrative spins out of control, the humor becomes more cutting and self-destructive. While the characters are a bit flat, reading the book was the perfect antidote to my rather upsetting reading of Lemon Cake.

The Financial Lives of the Poets is notable for its knowing, wearied tone towards the financial crisis. It is offbeat without being downright silly and Jess Walter does not sacrifice seriousness regarding is subject for humor; instead, they play rather perfectly off of one another, each deepening in turn the quality of depth in its counterpart.