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An Unemployed Girl’s Review of a Novel on Unemployment
The Financial Lives of the Poets by Jess Walter makes a fine primer on unemployment for the uninitiated. But for the over-educated and under-employed (me, for example) that the protagonist Matt Prior is based on, it can be plain unsettling at times to discover your anxious likeness captured and distilled into eloquent, neatly packaged prose.
Matt is aptly named, as the recession has gone and rubbed its dirty feet all over him. But his hare-brained career choices are as much to blame for his situation as the forces of Wall Street.
Poor Matt. What was he thinking when he left his job at the newspaper to start poetfolio.com, a site that combines poetry and financial advice? Ever penitent, Matt confesses: “But I never disliked my job. Worse (and it’s with great shame that I admit this), I took my job for granted. Worse yet, I never believed that my job was worthy of me.”
Somewhere a genius economist is factoring the shame index into this recession
Oh yes, sing it brother! There are many moments when Matt is speaking the language of us sorry, jobless, middle-class schmucks—and doing it with more clarity and precision than most of us can muster right about now.
Confession is a recurring theme in The Financial Lives of the Poets. At the novel’s opening, Matt can’t bring himself to tell his wife just how close they are to losing the house (“as early as next week”). As the novel follows our anti-hero further down his rabbit hole, Matt only digs deeper, confessing everything—including actual crimes to actual cops when a trip to the 7-Eleven for milk for the kids turns into a last ditch effort to save the house by dealing pot to his acquaintances. Matt doesn’t pull off an episode of Weeds here. He gets caught.
“Somewhere a genius economist is factoring the shame index into this recession because we want to suffer, need to suffer,” Matt ponders. With a wife, two young boys, a senile father, a dream house, and both a police and grow operation to bring down in a cool, even 290 pages, Matt has no shortage of suffering to inflict upon himself and others.
Matt’s foolish schemes, failures, and crimes are laid out in the open like evidence before a jury of anyone with $25.99 (or a library card) and a few hours to spare.
Lucky for Matt, he’s a fictional character dreamed up by a benevolent, good-willed writer who makes sure that no one gets too hurt in the end. If only I could clap my hands and say, “The End. Good laughs. Well written.”
But for me, this novel is a jagged little mirror shoved so close to my face that I am gagging on myself. “Please, no more! No more!” I, too, once lived in a land where there was an office, a secretary, and a break room. I had a key fob that made all the locks blink green, drank greedily from the gourmet coffee dispenser of life, and smugly thought to myself every day, “I can do better.”
Matt’s sniveling guilt is my guilt, and I have beat myself up enough with wishful thinking and confessions to be sick of it.
“Why did you write this thing?” I accused Jess Walter, the author, with the venom known in nature only to excrete from the fangs of an unemployed bitch. He and the book had come into my life together, when both slid through the back door of a bar and into my little clan of Russians, lawyers, and artists.
“Why did I write “this thing”?” responded Walter, who has written five other books. “Why does anyone write anything?
“But if you were asking for my poverty bona fides, as a blue-collar, first-in-my family to college, teenage-father, college-dropout mid-list literary writer whose advances break down to about $30,000 a year and whose wife supplied benefits for the family before she was laid off last October (she did get her job back), trust me, no slumming here.”
Having convinced me not bite his head off, Walter continued: “I guess, in larger answer to your question, who doesn’t know what it feels like to come apart, to unravel? And having done so a few times, and come close others, I wanted to unravel, in this voice, the well-meaning fuckup. I wanted his hypomanic breakdown to mimic the economy’s.”
And for Matt and the many of us who are unraveling, life has come to that point where, as in the end of every game of Jenga, a game Matt’s son once adored, “there are no more safe moves, but still you must try, always try, because that’s the game.” After all, getting out of bed, moving about, and being that bitch who isn’t going down without a fight—that is the whole point of life, right? “Embrace it,” was Walter’s reply, to which he added, “Go, dog, go!”
Isabel Pen has little work experience and even less money. She spends her days in New York poking fun at herself in the shadows of her expensive law degree and chronically ill cat.
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4 comments for “An Unemployed Girl’s Review of a Novel on Unemployment”
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As troubling as these realities are–both fictional and actual–each serves as a useful cautionary tale for those of us from the entitlement generation. We forget that failure is not only a possible outcome, but often a very likely and inevitable event. Our shared cultural and academic experience often woefully under-prepares us for acknowledging, accepting, or dealing with this uncomfortable and unavoidable truth. Kudos to Matt Prior and Jess Walter for picking up where our parents, teachers, and college advisors left off.
I love books that invite us to judge the protagonist! It makes for great book club discussions.
I think there’s a bit of grass-is-greener going on here. The best money advice I ever got was, “Money is attitudinal.” I’ve made $7,000 a year and I’ve made $100,000 a year. While having plenty of green enabled me to afford things I wouldn’t otherwise have been able to do, it was always at the cost of time.
Having time is a wonderful sort of freedom. I guess I’ll have to read the book to find out if Matt’s real dilemma is having kids.
Or maybe Matt’s problem is that he, like most Americans, just doesn’t know how to handle money. It’s just common sense to have some savings before quitting your job.
I just read about a couple in their mid-30s, both with jobs, for a total salary of over $100,000. When the man’s salary was cut in half, their life savings melted from $28K to $10K. Where is the money going? My immigrant parents raised our family on today’s equivalent of $55K and still managed to save LOTS so college and retirement would never be a problem. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/14/business/economy/14income.html
There’s nothing quite like a book on unemployment- so many people who end up unemployed for one reason or another have the time to finally write that novel they’ve been longing to find the time for, and if they’re self-centered enough, such books often end up being about their own lives. How many self-help book writers might honestly suggest- if you can’t find a job doing something else, write self-help books and make millions! It worked for me! This is why so many, many musicals of the 40s, for instance, had protagonists who were either in, or trying to get into, show business. Not only did it make it easier to fit in the musical numbers, but it was the world in which the writers of those stories lived, anyway. As it is often said: Write what you know.
That being said, reading this review has given me a certain amount of interest evident in this book, if only as an exercise in existentialism.