Indicting the AIG-Bear Stearns-Lehman Brothers’ looting of the American dream, Easterbrook offers a must-have,...
Easterbrook’s (Sonic Boom, 2009, etc.) latest social commentary as literary fiction filters leverage buyouts, derivatives marketing and multimillion-dollar CEO bonuses through the lens of one wave-riding family.
Easterbrook isn’t subtle. Helot, the family surname, is ancient Greek for serf or slave. Posed as the author's symbolic question is whether this serfdom is voluntary. Life, after all, is pleasantly luxurious as the story begins in 2006. Easterbrook’s narrative tone is clinically ironic as he slides a slice of Helot life under the microscope. Tom is important at Corsair Assets, a private equity firm. Margo works a $2,500 coffee maker and chauffeurs daughters Caroline and Megan to fencing lessons and birthday parties. It’s the Reaganomics dream until Ken, Tom’s CEO in this world of debt swaps and derivatives, comes to dinner at the Helot house. Ken casually confesses to having looted Corsair into bankruptcy. Tom’s career enters a downward spiral, first spinning into consulting jobs with spare hope of permanent hiring, then to not-very-hopeful Internet startups, to commission sales at a big-box store, to temporary work as go-between for inept and corrupt management and recalcitrant and corrupt unions. Margo segues from at-home mother in a trendy McMansion to flirting for tips as a Hooters restaurant server. Meantime, Easterbrook itemizes, dissects and audits this world we have wrought: banking and investing; corporate life; health care and education; the ugly dichotomy between executive retention bonuses and an unlivable minimum wage; automation and manufacturing; consumerism and class distinction and social status; and nearly every other factor driving our “fast, flexible, kanban, sigma-six economy,” where people are expendable. Substitute class warfare for racial tension and what might be read as a sardonic, perhaps morbid, personal salvation narrative becomes a post-meltdown Bonfire of the Vanities.
Indicting the AIG-Bear Stearns-Lehman Brothers’ looting of the American dream, Easterbrook offers a must-have, Sub-Zero-refrigerator appraisal of what the Smartest Guys in the Room did to the American dream.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-250-01173-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
A tour de force.
In 1974, a troubled Vietnam vet inherits a house from a fallen comrade and moves his family to Alaska.
After years as a prisoner of war, Ernt Allbright returned home to his wife, Cora, and daughter, Leni, a violent, difficult, restless man. The family moved so frequently that 13-year-old Leni went to five schools in four years. But when they move to Alaska, still very wild and sparsely populated, Ernt finds a landscape as raw as he is. As Leni soon realizes, “Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.” There are many great things about this book—one of them is its constant stream of memorably formulated insights about Alaska. Another key example is delivered by Large Marge, a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who now runs the general store for the community of around 30 brave souls who live in Kaneq year-round. As she cautions the Allbrights, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.” Hannah’s (The Nightingale, 2015, etc.) follow-up to her series of blockbuster bestsellers will thrill her fans with its combination of Greek tragedy, Romeo and Juliet–like coming-of-age story, and domestic potboiler. She re-creates in magical detail the lives of Alaska's homesteaders in both of the state's seasons (they really only have two) and is just as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-Vietnam America.
A tour de force.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-312-57723-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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