The Financial Lives of the Poets audiobook

I recall standing in Seattle's Queen Anne Bookstore on a rainy late autumn afternoon in 2009, reading the jacket of this book and ultimately, passing. I wasn't familiar with Jess Walter, although this book seemed to be making quite the splash. I was, however, all too familiar with the effects of the global recession and I just wasn't ready to find it funny. Nope. Not yet. In fact, that very bookstore became one of its casualties a few years later. Fast-forward into a new decade. Jess Walter has become one of my favorite contemporary American writers. And although the effects of the recession are no less unfunny, time and perspective have only strengthened the relevancy of this book, if for the sheer amazement that America seems to have learned few lessons from its time teetering on the precipice of collapse. The cost of housing in Seattle is once again approaching the stratosphere; more than ever, it has become a City of Have More Than Anyone Else. But The Financial Lives of the Poets isn't set in that shining city on the Sound. It's set in perennially grim Spokane, Walter's home, the conservative capital of the Northwest's Inland Empire. Spokane's a bit stalwart, a bit stale, but solid, uncompromising, built on farming fortunes. A good place to raise a family. As long as you don't hang out at the 7/11.As long as you don't bet your family's financial security on a website that offers financial advice in poetic form. I mean really, what could go wrong? Matt Prior has been out of work for a while. When things were flush—only a few days ago, it seems—he and his wife Lisa bought their dream house (more than they could afford of course, but remember when home loan companies were just THROWING money at us?) and Matt poured money into the stock market, congratulating himself for investments that seemed sure bets. She had a good job, he bid a snarky adieu to the crumbling newspaper biz to launch poetfolio.com, and for a heartbeat, the future was theirs. Then the economy collapsed. You can guess what happens next. Personal Finance Shitstorm. As the story opens, forty-six-year-old Matt has less than a week to make a $31,000 balloon payment on his mortgage. He and his wife, Lisa, have no health insurance. Their savings, including once-flush 401(k)s, are tapped out, Lisa's working a crap job in an optometrist's office, Matt's dementia-inflicted dad has moved in, Catholic school tuition for their two elementary-aged sons is killing them (the Priors aren't even Catholic, but their neighborhood has stopped gentrifying and the local school is like Rikers Island for the Wii set), and Matt is fairly certain Lisa is having an affair with her high school sweetheart, Chuck.Could you blame him, then, for hanging out at the 7/11 with a bunch of satin tracksuit-clad white gangbangers, smoking weed and eating pork rinds? Could you blame him for seeing the financial opportunity in selling pot to his middle-aged friends, just until he can get his family out of their financial hole? Tapping the keg of American zeitgeist, Walter—à la Weeds and Breaking Bad—sends us down the rabbit hole of Very Bad Decisions made with Generally Good Intentions. Matt's insomnia imbues the narrative with a slightly surreal, hallucinatory glow, heightened by his pot-laced paranoia and Grandpa's dementia. There is tender relief offered by his two sons, reminding us that this is a book about the aspirations and failings of fathers, the vulnerability of sons, and how boys become men, or at least try to. The brilliance of Jess Walter is the LAUGH OUT LOUD caper crazies of his characters, who kill you with their cluelessness yet manage to retain such believable humanity, such depth of sincerity, that you cheer them on from one fuck-up to the next. Because there is always a sense of "There but for the grace of God, go I". We know and love and are embarrassed and infuriated by these people because they are us. The Financial Lives of the Poets is social satire with a warm, beating heart and fleshed-out, wounded characters who earn our compassion even as we are choking on our laughter. Oh, and that bookstore on Queen Anne that bit the recession dust? Some local residents and former employees banded together and resurrected it in 2013 as Queen Anne Book Company. It's going strong.

How could a story about a family in crisis be so comical? Most of the time I didn’t know whether I wanted to laugh or cry . This is actually a pretty funny story mixed with the sad state of affairs that Matt Prior finds himself in. During the financial crisis of 2008, out of a job, financially in debt so deep, he’s about to lose his house and car and pretty much everything including his wife who may be having an affair with an old boyfriend. Maybe it got a little over the top, a little too wacky to believe and every time I thought that I just couldn’t read any more , what happened was that I couldn’t stop reading. No matter what Matt did, I couldn’t stop liking him and rooting for him. Crazy, desperate choices by a man who is willing to do what he has to do because he loves his family. That was realistic and touching. This is the fourth book by Jess Walter that I’ve read . I definitely need to get to the rest . He’s become one of my favorites.

Warning: The first part of this review consists of my idle musings on a topic that occurred to me while reading this book. If you don’t give a damn about that and just want to get on with the review, skip down.Ever notice how it seems like the same idea start showing up in a variety of tv shows, films, or books at roughly the same time? I’m not talking about the straight-up rip-offs that appear when something like The DaVinci Code hits it big or when trends like vampires or zombies become hot and spark countless films, books, comics, etc. to cash in. I’m talking about when a specific idea seems to come up repeatedly. For example, back in the ‘90s, Grosse Pointe Blank had a gag where a hit man was talking to a therapist. A year later, Lawrence Block had his contract killer Keller talking to a shrink in the book Hit Man.* Two years after that, psychiatrist Billy Crystal was giving advice to a mobbed-up Robert DeNiro in Analyze This. That same year saw the beginning of Tony Soprano’s relationship with Dr. Melfi.* Correction - Someone pointed out in the comments that Block wrote the short story Keller In Therapy before Grosse Pointe Blank came out. In the novel Hit Man Block took several Keller short stories and used them as bits for the novel, and I had only read the novel not the stories so I didn't realize that Block had beaten GPB to the punch as far as the idea of a hit man talking to a therapist. As a Lawrence Block fan, this makes me happy.None of these really seem like any form of plagiarism. Even though they all traded on the idea of a professional criminals talking to psychiatrists, they all did very different things with the concept. Yet, it always bugged me a little. I feel like David Chase, creator of The Sopranos, should be sending royalty checks and gift baskets to the Gross Pointe Blank screenwriters Lawrence Block.I got that same feeling while reading The Financial Lives of the Poets when a broke suburbanite turns to dealing pot to save his house. Didn’t Weeds already do this story? And hasn’t Breaking Bad earned acclaim for having a dweeb science teacher turn to dealing meth when facing cancer and huge medical bills?Other than that basic idea of a desperate law-abiding citizen becoming a drug dealer due to financial hardship, these stories have little else in common. And the idea of the ordinary person turning to crime due to extenuating circumstances has been done a million different ways. You can’t copyright a basic idea. (e.g. Superman led to countless rip-offs, but DC quickly found out that as long as the costumes and powers were slightly different, they lost most of their lawsuits because they couldn’t own the superhero concept.) But whenever I notice an incident of these similar ideas, it makes me think about where the line is as far as specific plot points.We now resume your regularly scheduled review.Matt Prior is in a bit of a pickle. He used to be a financial reporter who let the skyrocketing value of his home and a few good stock picks blind him to the huge debt he was accumulating. Plus, he made the spectacularly bad decision of quitting his newspaper job to start a website that combined financial news and poetry. When the bottom dropped out of the economy in 2008, Matt finds himself jobless and on the verge of losing his house.He also has to try and take care of his father, who is suffering from dementia, and he’s pretty sure that his wife’s flirtation with an old boyfriend on Facebook is turning into something more serious. Plus, if he can’t afford the private school tuition for his two sons, he’s convinced that the shitty public school in his area will only teach his boys how to sharpen plastic spoons into shivs.When Matt does a late night convenience store run for milk, he meets some young stoners and ends up getting high with them. Realizing that the pot of today is much improved from the marijuana of his youth and that all the middle-aged people he knows would welcome the chance to buy some high-grade weed, Matt hatches a desperate scheme to use the last of his money to buy a couple of pounds of pot from his new stoner pals and re-sell it.This was an incredibly well-written book that uses dark humor to explore the economic abyss that many people found themselves in after the real estate bubble burst. Matt’s predicament is all too familiar, and his sadly funny reflections on how he followed the ‘expert’ financial advice right over the cliff is a grim reminder of how bad things have been for some people in the last couple of years. The book also deals with the guilt that Matt feels for not realizing sooner that his high-debt lifestyle could only have led to disaster.I had never heard of Jess Walter and picked this book up when the title caught my eye, and I saw a gajillion raving blurbs on the cover. I’ll definitely be checking out more of his work.

This is going to take some linguistic acrobatics. I'm going to spend the next 500 or so words trying to convince you that a story about bad choices, despair, near-financial ruin, and a failing marriage is one of the funniest, most charming, and downright best books you'll read in a long, long time. Jess Walter's The Financial Lives of the Poets is fantastic — an authentic and timely story, featuring cameos from the mortgage crisis, the slow death of newspapers, and the increasingly intense culture wars. But Walter manages to keep it light, and it's just a whole lot of fun! The story goes like this: Middle-aged Matt Prior's comfortable upper-middle-class suburban life has imploded, and now he's like a guy in one of those air-blown-money-grab phone booths, trying to grasp at the tatters of his sanity. Two years ago, Matt had quit his secure job as a financial journalist to start a Web site in which financial advice is doled out in poetry form (hence, the novel is peppered with snippets of free verse). At the last minute, he got cold feet, went back to his newspaper, but was laid off four months later. Now, Matt is a few days from losing his house. And his wife, apparently fed up with how things have gone down lately, is ramping up a Facebook flirtation with an old boyfriend.But this all happened "off page." The novel actually begins in medias res with unemployed, increasingly desperate Matt (who I kept envisioning looking exactly like Walter's photo [at left] on the back flap) going out late at night to buy milk at a 7-Eleven. Offered a joint by a stoned teenager in the parking lot, Matt thinks "what the hell?" and spends the rest of the night out partying.Over the next few days, Matt agonizes over whether to confront his wife about her impending infidelity and attempts to navigate the maze of automated answering options to beg his mortgage holder for an extension. Finally, believing himself out of sensible options, he decides that the only way to make enough money to solve his problems is to leverage his new pot-smoking buds to help him make a massive marijuana purchase, which he'll then sell to middle-aged folk like himself who are nostalgic for happier times.This is the first of many terrible decisions that speeds Matt's demise. You know how when you spend way more than you wanted to on, say, a suit, and so then it's not hard to convince yourself that "hey, since I'm already way over budget, what's another $100?" So you pick up the silk tie, too. On a much grander scale, this is exactly what Matt does — bad decisions beget bad decisions, each time eroding any notion of possible consequences. Still, amazingly, by the end of the novel, you just feel terrible for him! The best part of this book is the writing. It's...just...fantastic.** The NY Times once called Walter "a ridiculously talented writer," and frankly there's no better way to put it than that. Like Beat the Reaper, this was an under-the-radar hit in 2009, and landed on many Best Of 2009 lists, including Time's, which is very, very well-deserved. Do yourself a favor — read this! **If you're interested, here is my favorite passage from the book. The setup: Matt has gone to the home improvement store where his wife's Facebook flirt works to do some anonymous reconnaissance. He's pretending to be building a tree fort for his two sons: "He stops in the aisle of how-to books and clicks his tongue as he runs his hand across the spines of books that show how to do simple electrical work and how to repair and carburetor and how to fix a clogged sink and how to build a porch and how to stain your fence and, finally, how to build a tree fort. This long bookshelf seems taken directly from my insecurities — an entire library of things I cannot do. In the next aisle of this hell-library would be books about how to manage your billions and what to do with your foot-long penis."

Richard Russo, one of my favorite writers, was asked a while back to name some recent books he’d enjoyed. He rattled off a few titles then ended his list with “anything by Jess Walter.” I can see why. Walter is funny, writes as though it’s an easy thing to do, reveals what we recognize as true human nature, and creates characters who aren’t perfect, but you find yourself pulling for anyway. In other words, he’s a lot like Russo. This particular one may not reach the same heights as Citizen Vince (the best of the four Walter books I’ve now read), but it’s still entertaining. On the face of it, the plot might seem silly. Matt Prior quit his job with the newspaper to launch a website devoted to financial news and commentary presented entirely in blank verse. In the meantime, his beautiful but perhaps less than faithful wife developed an eBay addiction. Their financial situation was understandably dire. The story begins at a 7-Eleven where Matt falls in with a pack of dope-smoking slackers. His schemes for getting back on track seem to have been influenced by the new, pharmacologically advanced pot that he sampled. Trouble ensues, along with a dark and sarcastic form of hilarity. The Financial Lives of the Poets is well worth the small investment in time. And there’s plenty of great dialog to make it livelier still. My only criticism is that it seemed almost too easy. When a track star runs the mile, we’d be disappointed if he’s not breathing hard, even if he finishes below 4 minutes. Walter said in an interview at the end of the book that it took him a very short while (not more than a few months) to put this one together. Be that as it may, I contend that the hastily constructed ramblings by a talented guy like Walter are far better than the ponderous works by the multitudes of lesser lights.

If I were a publisher, I’d fight to publish Jess Walter. He writes funny literary commercial novels with mass appeal, and I’m happy to be part of his adoring public.The Financial Lives of Poets is my fourth Walter book, and my favorite so far: Unemployed business journalist and American Dream-addict Matt Prior’s downward spiral into inept drug dealing is not dark, because he’s so honest about his desperation and idiot attempts to save his and his family’s behinds. I loved everybody in this book, and mostly I love Jess Walter for applying his fine literary technique to such a sweet story that you can feel his love.

A former financial journalist decides to branch out into a new, innovative field - financial news presented in poetic form! Unfortunately poetfolio.com doesn't take off and leaves him with a mountain of debt. Couple that with his wife's eBay addiction, his weeks of unemployment, and the financial crash of 2008 and he soon finds himself 1 week away from eviction from his dream house. At a loose end one night, he encounters some stoners and begins to think about dealing weed to get out of his immediate cash troubles. Add to this his wife pursuing an old high school crush via Facebook, his dementia-ridden father who was bilked out of his savings and house by a stripper and her boyfriend, and the perils of the drug dealing world, and you have "The Financial Lives of the Poets". I loved Jess Walter's book "Citizen Vince" and followed it immediately with "The Zero", a more experimental difficult read that I failed to finish and which put me off Walter for a bit. I'm glad I came back to check out his latest though as it was a fantastic novel with some excellent characters and a brilliant storyline. I particularly enjoyed/cringed at Matt (the main character) and his wife Lisa's strained marriage as the tension between them builds and the distance between them grows. It felt very real and was the first time I'd seen some of the less positive effects of Facebook reflected in a novel. Matt's encounters with the drug dealers was also interesting with a paranoid lawyer thrown into the mix making for lively conversations. I would ignore the Nick Hornby blurb which claims that it's an hilarious book as it really isn't. Some of the scenes are light hearted and a bit silly but overall it's a serious novel. This isn't a bad thing though as the writing is top notch, the story doesn't need gags to keep the reader interested, and the characters are wonderfully realised to keep you invested in what happens to them. Matt's relationship with his dementia addled father is particularly touching. Also the ending is remarkably good, Walter showing he is a writer who can write all aspects of a novel brilliantly, beginnings, middles and ends, a rare thing in writers. One of the best novels I've read all year, original, well written, imaginative, with great characters, a fast moving and interesting story. I can't recommend this higher to anyone looking for a good book to read.

Jess Walter has, in short shrift, become my single favorite contemporary author. I was first introduced to his work through his contribution to the series of short stories in the Amazon Warmer cli-fi collection, where he was absolutely brilliant. This innovative novel has only solidified my fan status.The Financial Lives of the Poets opens with an introduction to Matt, an out-of-work journalist fresh off of a failed business attempt to meld poetry and financial articles in an online format—and in debt up to his eyeballs. The piece then proceeds to chronicle Matt’s desperate, yet hilarious, attempts to save his home, his family and himself. From his first encounter with a group of twenty-something stoners at a 7/11 to his eventual run in with law enforcement, Matt stumbles forward whilst consistently taking two steps back. His less-than-truthful wife, his increasingly senile father and his new weed-smoking friends are all along for the ride and add just enough color to keep the reader from falling into a funk over the existential overtones that don’t reconcile until the bitter end. The novel moves between chapters, intertwining prose and poetry in a Shakespeare-worthy plot that hovers somewhere between comedy and tragedy. The writing in both formats is beyond genius, as evidenced here, in a passage that left me in awe of this writer’s talent: http://a.co/3FjGtNN. This is a novel for those who love language and can appreciate a dry wit that is at once self-deprecating and self-indulged. If I could rate this beyond five stars, I absolutely would do so. For now, however, five will have to suffice! If you haven’t yet read Jess Walter, this is the perfect place to start.

Heard good things about this book and since it was "if you like that one, you'll like this one" book recommendation from what was my favorite read of last year, Jonathan Tropper's "This Is Where I Leave You," I thought I'd give it a shot. I can see why the books were grouped together as Tropper's Judd Foxman is in a similar mid-life-ish crisis/downward spiral mode as Matt Prior, whose life is in disarray after his dream of a financial poetry website (poetfolio.com!) spectacularly crashes and burns in tandem with the US economy.All credit to Jess Walter for turning around a book so quickly on the dark/flip side of the American dream and the accompanying wake-up up call of living beyond one's means and having each and every one those proverbial chickens coming home to roost. While this sounds mighty depressing, Jess Walter presents it all in a very funny, snarky, satirical way. Matt is so down-trodden you can't help but sympathize with him even despite all the bad choices he has made in the past and continues to make through this novel. Given the similar nature/tone of the two books, I was unfairly comparing it to Tropper's book and when the book takes a turn that I thought to be fairly derivative of sub-plot the Showtime series "Weeds," I started having my doubts about it. But there is so much more going on here... from little gems about raising kids to caring for an aging parent (this part is simultaneously funny and heartbreaking) to one's alternative online and cell-phone life, made it break free from any comparative baggage I brought to it.Ultimately it turns into a quite heart-felt story of redemption and reevaluation. I'd give it 4.5 stars.

Do you ever read one book, usually a break-out book, from an author and wonder where did he/she come from? What else have they written? That was the case with me with Jess Walter. I read his recent Beautiful Ruins and loved it. So, I picked up The Financial Lives of the Poets (what a risky, terrifically provoking title) and loved it! It hits close to home -- a newspaper writer is laid off, on the brink of financial collapse, and on a late night excursion for over-priced milk for his two young sons, meets up with some local pot dealers. It's a wild ride after that -- with poetry included!! I love his use of descriptive language -- I love how he mixes genres in this work as he did in Beautiful Ruins. This is a must-read for any would-be writer of the modern American experience! Truly, author of LIE.

I really loved Citizen Vince, and was slightly less enamored of The Zero. But Walter is up to his old tricks in ...Poets. What a goofball! He had me snorting with runaway laughter...everything is on the skewed side of perfectly possible...sort of like trying to reason with someone who's smoked too much pot. Their mind rotates, quickly at first, in smaller and smaller circles, until they reach some inevitable stupid conclusion, much like the protagonist in this book. Gets his life in a twist and continues to dig and dig until everything is completely buried. Adored the Aussie accent.

For everyone who put their faith in the American dream, the bubble that would never burst, this book is for them. Matt Prior – the desperate narrator of The Financial Lives of the Poets – is truly everyman…a basically good person who is now scrambling to stay marginally solvent in the wake of the hu

I have found that Jess Walter is an author many readers are not familiar with - Acquaint yourself with him. He's an excellent writer but he is difficult to categorize by genre. He's written two non-fiction book and five novels - which range from mysteries to satire. With his writing he's able to transport the reader to situations so real that it'll give you chills. For instance in an earlier novel - Land of the Blind - he captures the difficult times of junior high so effectively that my stomach knotted up while reading the portrayal. His books are not overly dark, but he captures both the good and the bad in his novels, so be prepared to be drawn in.The Financial Lives of Poets is satire - dark satire. The protagonist, Matt Prior, finds himself mired neck-deep in the country's current financial crisis - he's lost his job, he's spent most of his savings and he and his family are days away from losing their home to foreclosure. His father - suffering from dementia and who has his own darkly funny story - lives in the Prior household and just to add a little more fuel to the fire - Matt's all but positive that his wife is having an affair.Depressing? Sure - but Matt has a plan just like Ralph Kramden had plans. And just like with “The Honeymooners” the reader knows how things will turn out but you can't help but watch and follow Matt on his hare-brained but good-hearted folly. The reader also spends time inside Matt's head and this can get very uncomfortable - especially for men. We've all had moments of self-doubt, self-consciousness, self-pity and self-loathing - well Matt has hours and even days of such "moments". All of these moments are poignant and many are downright hilarious, but funny with the caveat - “Thank God it's not me."As an aside there is verse and poetry sprinkled throughout the book - plot-wise this makes sense - and even though I am poetically challenged I didn't have a problem with this and even enjoyed some of it.Excellent book and highly recommended - and probably not like anything you've read recently.

Matt Prior is/was a newspaperman in recession times when newspapers had begun sinking torturously one by one. After losing his job at the paper, he took an unfortunate, yet creatively ballsy risk on a poetry site that gave financial advice...We meet Matt when he is on the brink of losing his house to foreclosure and his wife to an online affair with her high school boyfriend. Sounds hilarious, right? But somehow, Financial Lives of Poets manages precisely that. Jess Walters pulls off a wickedly sardonic wit, while tugging his readers' heartstrings, AND evoking reflection on the gluttonous entitlement that is often inherited as a part of one's American-ness. Walters forces a look at debt, excess, and greed not only as they relate to the U.S. economy, but at how they seep over into relationships and daily life. Readers pause a moment to read the possible side effects of the poison of our oft unspoken mantra, "Yes I have enough, but I could have more- my family and I deserve better."Everything I have read of Walters' deserves at least a solid four and a half stars...but I am rounding up. Over the past couple of years, Jess Walters has become one of my favorite writers, mostly because he writes characters that I love and can identify with, but also because of his humor and mad writing skills(z).;) He makes me feel clever for picking up on his numerous allusions and his sense of irony and dark humor keep me coming back for more.*I mentioned this in my check in, but it made me feel like SUCH a fan girl at the giddiness I felt finding Vince/Marty and his Picnic Basket restaurant in Financial Lives of Poets. Book Nerd much? YES! Thank you.

Hilarious, sarcastic, dry wit from beginning to end. I found myself laughing out loud several times. The main character was a mix of Walter White from Breaking Bad and Henry Holyoak Lightcap from Edward Abbey's, The Fool's Progress and Harry Angstrom from John Updike's Rabbit, Run. Cynical and a little angry about the hand he has been dealt.I read another book by Jess Walter, Beautiful Ruins, a couple years ago, which I enjoyed, as well. However, the stories and styles are so different, it's hard to believe they were written by the same author! This just shows Walter's talented range.My only criticism would be that I wish the wife character had been better developed. Also, it felt a little rushed and tied up too neatly at the end. And just a head's up, this story is NOT for everyone. Strong, first-person, male vibe with a lot of edgy commentary and jokes about the absurdity of our lives. I loved it!