Darkly comic take on the “greed is good” shenanigans that led up to the recent financial apocalypse.
Young Manhattan matron comes up with a unique solution to emerging threats to her family’s future.
There is something just a bit off about Daisy Greenbaum. In spite of her incredible wealth, good looks and bright twin daughters, she does not quite fit in among skeletal lady-lunchers in her Upper East Side social scene. While she manages for the most part to mask her inner rage, filling her dull days with charity projects, the burgeoning 2008 financial crisis finally offers her long-dormant inner sociopath a chance to run free. Her husband Dick is a Wall Street math whiz who has figured out how to make a killing in credit default swaps. But Dick, although deeply flawed, is beginning to fret over the long-term financial and ethical implications of his work for The Bank (think Goldman Sachs). He can see the end coming and wants to go to the authorities. But when he reaches out to his boss John, a preppy tool who has none of Dick’s scruples, John threatens to ruin him for even thinking of exposing them. Enter Daisy, who, unbeknownst to Dick, drugs and murders John while making it look like a suicide. So Dick gets promoted. Daisy is then vexed to discover that Dick’s former mistress, the Lady Petra Kingly, is once again sniffing around her husband. Trophy wife to a much-older man who is about to get caught running an elaborate Ponzi scheme, Lady Petra sees Dick as her only chance at a lucrative future. Dick, while no longer interested in Petra, fears that she will reveal his secrets. Daisy once again takes matters in hand, just as Dick starts to realize, with an appropriate amount of gratitude, what she is up to. Meanwhile, an ambitious young blogger, Candy Ross Rose, sees a career-making opportunity in taking down The Bank. She fixates on seducing none other than Dick Greenbaum. Big mistake. Jong-Fast’s edgy follow-up to Normal Girl (2000) seems meant to be a broad social satire about the über-wealthy, but it’s held back by the underwritten Daisy, whose murderous impulses are the most interesting thing about her.
Darkly comic take on the “greed is good” shenanigans that led up to the recent financial apocalypse.Pub Date: April 26, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-345-50189-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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