Here is a book coming out in a few weeks that I learned about from The Savvy Reader, the blog written by Deanna at HarperCollins Canada: The Financial Lives Of The Poets by Jess Walter. Her synopsis:
As he did in his landmark novel The Zero, considered by many readers and critics the best post-9/11 work of fiction, Jess Walter once again captures the current zeitgeist of universal financial meltdown through this story of one over-leveraged family’s near collapse. The story revolves around the Priors — a typical middle class family — mortgaged to their hairlines and compromised by years of foolhardy moneymaking schemes (Matt’s financial-slash-poetry web site, Lisa’s eBay figurine business). A chance late-night encounter with a couple of neighbourhood youths and some high-grade weed sets Matt off on his next entrepreneurial disaster. You can’t help but be captivated as Walter blends high anxiety with his impeccable comic tone in a novel that is certain to expand his growing readership.
I also found this review from Page&Turners on Goodreads:
In this hilarious and poignant novel, Edgar-award winning author Jess Walter spares nothing and no one as he sets his sniper-sights on 9/11, drug dealers, marriage, modern masculinity, social networking sites, eBay, smug economists, baby-boomers, the rich, the poor, the old, the demise of the newspaper, Somali pirates, climate change, and, above all, the Global Financial Crisis – its causes and effects, and our collective complicity in it. All of this enveloped in a suitably ridiculous but very entertaining plot involving an out-of-work journalist’s attempt to save his house by pursuing a rather dubious entrepreneurial venture. The internal monologue, appropriately distracted and neurotic, is something like a cross between Updike's Rabbit Angstrom and Sam Lipsyte's Teabag. "Financial Lives" is an angry, absurd, and hilarious rant.
This book kind of sounds like a cross between Jonathan Franzen and Tom Wolfe (the Bonfire era). I'd love to read it! It comes out on Sept. 22.