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The Financial Lives Of The Poets (2009)

by Jess Walter(Favorite Author)

3.68 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

0061916048 (ISBN13: 9780061916045)

languge

English

genre

Humor

publisher

Harper

review 1: The writing is fantastic as are the characters. Well now that I think of it only the male characters are fantastic, because as usual with Walter the women come across as weak, easily-manipulated, victims or plain stupid. A surprising thing I have found when I have read any of Jess Walter's books, is that I can never remember any of the character's names - I think that's because Walter's writes about "everyman" characters. Yes mostly they are losers with notions of respectability and the idea that the world owes them a living - and this is the case again for Matt Prior aka Slippers. This book was heading for 5 stars because of the zany wacky drug-induced neurosis which trips the reader along as Slippers falls deeper into disillusion and fantasy, but then something AWFUL hap... morepened. In the final quarter of the book every fell apart. Why, oh why did Walter chose this ending? The book feels about 200 pages shorter than it could have been - and if the stories had continued then I think the ending would have been much more dramatic and honest.
review 2: Matt Prior is unemployed and weeks away from losing his house and possibly his wife. Bad decisions got him here, but now that he's desperate and not sleeping, the plan is coming together: put together all the cash he can ($9000) and go into business as a pot dealer. While this sounds like a better plan than starting a website that would offer financial advice in verse form (that's what got him into this mess) it turns out it is not as easy as it sounds to mix caring for your senile father, getting the kids to school on time and spying on your straying wife with moving a couple pounds of weed. Jess Walter writes a funny poignant indictment of modern life, and the poems sprinkled throughout are a great extra. less

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