Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:   

Author:   Jess Walter

Genre:  Fiction, Satire, Humor

304 pages, published September 22, 2009

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

The Financial Lives of the Poets tells the story of Matt Prior, who gave up his business journalist job to start a blog called Poetfolio which conveyed financial news in the form of poems.  Needless to say, Poetfolio didn’t work out all that well and Matt is in danger of  losing everything else in his life, his wife, his house, his children until he discovers a way to save it all that seems too good to be true.  

 

Quotes

“But it’s not easy, realizing how we fucked it all up. And that turns out to be the hardest thing to live with, not the regret or the fear, but the realization that the edge is so close to where we live.”

 

“Among the world’s evils—fascism, ethnic cleansing, environmental degradation—smoking deserves the most severe curricular attention in my kids’ school.”

 

“I don’t know what I expected – no maybe I do, Al Pacino from Scarface- but this drug dealer is more like Al Pacino at the beginning of The Godfather reasonably bemused, untouched by his

criminal world, sitting with Diane Keaton whispering about Luca Brazzi, not yet asleep with the fishes, or like Al Pacino from Glengarry Glen Ross, although actually, now that I think about it, he’s not like Al Pacino at all but more like Kevin Spacey from that film, and who’s ever been afraid of Kevin Spacey?”

 

“my money guy Richard is going without a tie now, like a politician who wants to appeal to the suffering common man (or perhaps every morning his firm takes the ties and shoelaces away from the brokers and financial planners to keep them from offing themselves)”

 

“Listen,” Richard says, „unless you’re about to inherit some money, what we’re talking about here is irreversible, fatal. You have fiscal Ebola, Matt. You are bleeding out through your nose and your mouth and your eye sockets, from your financial asshole.”

See! Fiscal Ebola? My financial asshole is bleeding? This was exactly why I started poetfolio.com; there are money poets everywhere.”

 

“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.”

My Take

After finishing Beautiful Ruins, Jess Walters’ best-selling and critically acclaimed 2012 book, I wanted to read more by this amazing author.  After a quick Amazon search, I zeroed in on The Financial Lives of the Poets, a satirical book about the financial crisis that Walter had written a few years earlier.  It did not disappoint. From the hilarious concept of “Poetfolio,” a website that delivers financial news in the form of poems, to great characters to his capture of the zeitgeist of 2008 financial meltdown era, Walters delivers a quick reading, fun book that has something interesting to say about our modern times.