“They are too accomplished. They have accumulated too much. They expect too much. They demand too much. They even love their kids too much. This love is crippling in its own way.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (AUG 2, 2011)

Somewhere on the journey from the comfortable upstate college town of Ithaca to the glistening moneyed world of downtown Manhattan, the Burgamots have lost their way.

Dad Richard has become consumed by his prestigious executive role at a major New York university. Mom Liz is fielding social calls and taking her young adopted daughter to sleepovers in a lush and decadent midtown hotel where “the central part of the suite looked exactly like the one Tony Soprano had once rented in a dream sequence…double sink, toilet, shower, and bidet in the size of a studio apartment.” And their teenage son, Jake? He’s navigating adolescence without a roadmap. Like all too many teens, he feels like he “didn’t belong here, in the city, in this apartment, at this school, or in this family…”

This is a family crusin’ for a bruisin’. And it all comes to a head when one morning, Jake received an explicit emailed video from a sexually precocious eighth-grade admirer named Daisy. Stunned and clueless, Jake is overcome by a cocktail of emotions: “He’d gotten hard. He’d gotten proud. He’d been appalled, scared; he’d wanted to show off.” And just like that, without forethought, he clicks and forwards to a close friend…who clicks and forwards to HIS close friends…and so on. Soon the video has gone viral all over the world and Jake – and his entire family – is in murky legal waters.

Author and social observer Helen Schulman maps out this family’s spiraling journey to the top – and their ignoble withdrawal from favor. With cinematic pacing – reminding me somewhat of Zoe Heller’s What Was She Thinking?: Notes on a Scandal— she moves her focus in and out, in a blistering look at a family on the crossroads

Had this book remained tightly focused on the ensuing scandal, it would have been a page turning “read.” But Ms. Schulman is more ambitious. She takes on broader themes: how one two-second bad decision can change a teen’s whole future, when today’s technology in involved. How one’s sense of identity and security are all fragile conceits that can disappear in a heartbeat. And perhaps most important, how wealth without grounding can turn individuals into careless people who use questionable tactics to get optimum results. Like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, it becomes all too easy. The Bergamots, too, are on the verge of those who “smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness.”

With an abundance of psychological acuity, Helen Schulman tracks a family who is having difficulty managing “this beautiful life” – a life that shows cracks and fissures along its underbelly. Everyone is affected, even their young daughter Coco, who, with her overblown kindergarten graduation ceremony and over-the-top schedule, is primed (it is hinted) for a similar destiny to Daisy’s. The ending is wrapped up a little too quickly, but the fragility of the shattered sense of self – for Jake, for the young girl, for Liz and Richard – lingers. No one is insulated by privilege…not when the demands of life have become so complex. And no one, the author suggests – rich or not so rich – is immune to the sudden scandal in a digital age.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 126 readers
PUBLISHER:	Harper (August 2, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Helen Schulman
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Testimony by Anita Shreve Aftermath by Brian Shawyer What Was She Thinking? by Zoe Heller

Bibliography:

• Not a Free Show: Stories (1988)
• Out of Time (1991)
• The Revisionist (1998)
• P.S. (2001)
• A Day at the Beach (2007)
• This Beautiful Life (August 2011)

“Usually he finds flights relaxing. Once you are up there in the nothingness you can plunge deep into your own thoughts. But tonight he is troubled. […] The cabin lights are dimmed and he’s now sitting all alone in a bright cone directed from the overhead lamp towards his table. The light seems to suggest that he is under interrogation. It’s at these moments he knows that he is not really cut out to be a financial mogul.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  (JUN 1, 2011)

This is Julian Trevelyan-Tubal, CEO of Tubals’, the last family-owned bank in London, founded by his ancestor Moses Tubal over three centuries before. He stands uneasily in the titanic shadow of his father, Sir Harry Trevelyan-Tubal, still the titular head of the bank, but long since removed from day-to-day affairs. Sir Harry lives in luxury in his villa in Antibes, his mind damaged by a stroke, dictating daily letters to his son which only his secretary Estelle understands and even reads. He is unaware of changes at the bank since his days in the office. Adventures in the hedge fund and derivatives markets have caused much the same damage to Tubals’ as to other banks, and now Julian must fly to Liechtenstein to divert £250,000,000 illegally from the family trust to contain the damage long enough for him to sell the bank and get out, keeping this a secret from the financial world and even his own relatives.

For tradition and the appearance of probity are everything in banking. Moses Tubal’s descendants have long since been assimilated into the establishment, generations of English gentlemen produced by “years of evolution, fostered by rugby, cold showers, beating, poor food and study of the classics,” as Justin Cartwright wittily remarks. The guest-list for Sir Harry’s memorial service, with which the book opens in a leap-ahead prologue, is virtually the cream of British society, including such wonderful titles as “the Earl and Countess of Wendover, the Macallan of that Ilk and Lady Macallan, the Malcolm, Lord of the Western Isles,” and so on for two pages. When Sir Harry, a patron of the arts (and of its female practitioners), chose beautiful but only moderately talented actress Fleur MacCleod as his second wife, a quarterly payment was arranged for her first husband, a down-at-heel theater director called Artair, to keep him out of the way. In handling the transition following Sir Harry’s death, it is important that the irreproachable facade be maintained.

However, as the family regroup after the funeral, stresses begin to appear. Julian’s elder brother Simon returns from abroad and wants a part in things. Fleur is having an affair which may not easily be hushed up and the others regard her as a loose cannon. Estelle has an agenda of her own, and knows things that the others would not want told. But the most dangerous threat of all is almost trivial: when the bank cuts off the allowance paid to Fleur’s first husband Artair, a young reporter at the local newspaper named Melissa wants to know the reason why. The scenes set in Cornwall, the seagirt province where Artair recycles productions of “The Wind in the Willows” and “Thomas the Tank Engine” while writing a movie script that he fondly believes will be taken up by no less than Daniel Day-Lewis, make a break from the doings of the plutocracy, though they also seem less solid.

This may not be what is called “literary fiction,” but it is certainly literate — consistently well-written and with mostly believable characters. Think Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga for a new century; think Jeffrey Archer, only better; think Alan Hollingsworth’s The Line of Beauty without the gay sex. As a financial thriller, it is slow to get going and does not quite deliver at the end, but it does something more valuable. Quite remarkably, virtually all the characters are sympathetic, and most of them develop in depth as the financial and family pressures are released; this is especially true of Fleur, who starts as a stereotypical trophy wife and becomes more and more admirable and real. Even though Julian passes through a period where he begins to look like the villain of the piece, he too ends up rounder and warmer. Cartwright does not seem to have decided whether Artair is a caricature or a true artist, but either way he is fun. I confess to being disappointed by the curiously abrupt ending which is not entirely redeemed by an epilogue tying up all the loose threads one paragraph at a time. But that is a minor flaw; there is much here to enjoy.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 7 readers
PUBLISHER:	Bloomsbury USA (April 12, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Justin Cartwright
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Union Atlantic by Adam Haslett Human Capital by Steve Amidon

Bibliography:

• Deep Six (1972)
• Fighting Men (1977)
• Horse of Darius (1980)
• Freedom for the Wolves (1983)
• Interior (1988)
• Look at it This Way (1990)
• Masai Dreaming (1993)
• In Every Face I Meet (1995)
• Leading the Cheers (1998) 
• Half in Love (2001)
• White Lightning (2002)
• The Promise of Happiness (2005)
• The Song Before it is Sung (2007)
• To Heaven by Water (2009)
• Other People’s Money (April 2011)

Nonfiction:

• Not Yet Home (1997)
• This Secret Garden (2008)
• Oxford Revisited (2009)

“The issue finally wasn’t that he wanted to be rich, per se, but that he wanted to be done with so much WANTING.”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte  (APR 12, 2011)

If for nothing else, A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism will be remembered as a clear-eyed, unsentimental look at money and our complicated relationship with it. The protagonist in Peter Mountford’s debut novel is a young biracial man, Gabriel de Boya, who is on assignment for The Calloway Group, a New York hedge fund. He finds himself in La Paz in Bolivia—where the novel is set—on the eve of the election that would usher in Evo Morales as President.

Gabriel’s assignment is to predict first the outcome of the election, and subsequently its effect on the Bolivian gas industry. Gabriel’s boss in New York, the aggressive Priya Singh, would essentially like to speculate about whether Morales would nationalize the Bolivian gas industry right away, as he promised. To obtain such sensitive information, Gabriel works incognito in the city passing off as a freelance reporter on assignment.

It is as a reporter that Gabriel meets, and subsequently falls in love with, Lenka Villarobles—Morales’s press liaison. As their relationship progresses, Gabriel reveals his clandestine operations to Lenka, hoping that she will provide vital pieces of information he will need to keep the ever-demanding boss happy back home. When, at great risk to her job, Lenka does share crucial information with Gabriel, he must decide how to play it so as to maximize his own personal profit in the high stakes world of money markets. As he does so, he must also face up to the moral dilemmas attendant with such manipulations. Gabriel’s mother, an émigré to California from Chile and hardcore liberal, serves as a mirror to his moral conscience. About halfway through the novel, when she makes a sudden appearance in La Paz, Gabriel finds it increasingly hard to keep from lying to mom (thus far she thinks he works for a telephone company). Greed eventually wins and it remains to be seen whether Gabriel’s workings will have him emerge a winner.

Mountford does a wonderful job painting the city of La Paz—the reader gets a real pulse of what it is like to be there. Also well done is the history of the country, as outlined in brief asides, yet seamlessly incorporated into the overall narrative.

YMG is not without its negatives however. For one thing, the key events in the book seem to turn on rather big coincidences or at least chance occurrences. Gabriel’s first meeting with Lenka is one such example. Later on, Gabriel runs into the future finance minster outside a crowded church on Christmas Eve and the minister too shares vital information. It is hard to shake the slight implausibility with which these events occur.

Gabriel too is a frustratingly obtuse character. Mountford has tried to paint him as interestingly complex and at least when it comes to his view of money, he is. “Money, in general—the plain and unassailable acts of acquiring and spending it—had turned out to occupy a more important role in adulthood than he’d expected,” Mountford writes of Gabriel. “The issue finally wasn’t that he wanted to be rich, per se, but that he wanted to be done with so much wanting. It was a feedback loop, and the only way out was deeper in: he needed to have enough money to be done with the issue of money forever.”

But Gabriel ultimately turns out to be a mixed bag of contradictions. He seems too passive initially—just coasting along until Lenka is ready to drop some information and this passivity doesn’t match his later ambitious side.

The gradual buildup to his final high-stakes decisions is too mechanical, based more on game theory (one of the author’s favorite subjects is economics, he has said) rather than on any real human impulses. The same is true of his mother, who when she finds out the true shenanigans of her son, reacts in a rather extreme fashion. And as Mountford himself writes in the novel: “Real people’s motivations [are] too complex and flawed to be fathomed by any mathematics.” In other words, Gabriel comes across as too clinical to be real.

Where A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism does succeed in a big way is in capturing the role money plays in our lives. While most of us consider rampant greed a morally bankrupt concept, it is to Mountford’s immense credit that many a reader will relate to Gabriel’s views about money. So his subsequent actions fueled by greed, become extremely believable, even if they are inexcusable. As Edith Wharton once famously said: “The only way not to think about money is to have a great deal of it.” Gabriel—and many a reader—would definitely agree.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 7 readers
PUBLISHER:	Mariner Books; 1 edition (April 12, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Peter Mountford
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More money stories: The Financial Lives of Poets by Jesse Walter Das Kapital: a novel of love and money markets by Viken Berberian

Bibliography:

• A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism (April 2011)

“It seems a perverse joke, Claire thinks, after years of saving and insuring it had not been a fire or flood or disease that brought their world down. It wasn’t global warming or terrorism, no collapsing levies or tsunamis…. Instead, for Claire and Addison and Jory, it felt quite personal, like a precisely-placed bomb destroying only their lives, leaving their neighbors and friends to stand unscathed and sympathetically gawking.”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky  (OCT 16, 2010)

In Healer, by Carol Cassella, forty-three year old stay-at-home mom Claire Boehning had been living a charmed life with her biochemist husband, Addison, and their only daughter, fourteen-year-old Jory. After Addison sold his biotech company, he and his wife bought a beautiful lakeside house in Seattle, where Jory attended private school, took ballet lessons, and enjoyed hanging out at the mall with her friends. Suddenly, everything turns sour, and mother and daughter are forced to retreat to their vacation home in the mountains of Washington State, while Addison scrambles to recoup the losses that Claire knew nothing about until a store rejected her credit card.

One of the problems with living in a freezing summer dwelling in the middle of winter is that Claire does not have enough money to buy fuel. It will be a challenge just to keep the temperature bearable. Jory is in shock; she cannot believe that she will be living with her mother like a pauper, seeing her father intermittently, and attending a public school with kids she has never met. To make matters worse, Claire needs to find a job for the first time in fifteen years. She is a licensed doctor who quit medicine before completing her residency. Desperate for work, she takes the only position available, at a clinic where the patients are mostly migrant workers. She bones up on her rusty Spanish and scrambles to relearn the medical skills she has forgotten. Occasionally, Addison visits his wife and daughter, updating them on his efforts to find an investor who will help him get his lab running again.

Addison may have irrevocably lost his wife’s trust; certainly his pride is in ruins. Jory is still a child in many ways, and she takes out her frustration and bitterness on Claire, who is by default a single parent while her husband is busy trying to rebuild his career. As a fledgling doctor, Claire learns to live on little sleep, putting in long hours with her boss, Dr. Dan Zelaya, and his dedicated staff. Although she still loves Addison and wants to keep her family together, Claire cannot help but wonder if she can rely on a man whose imprudent decisions landed them in such a colossal mess.

This is a touching story about a family in crisis, not just financially, but also emotionally. The author goes back and forth in time, slowly filling in the back story of how Claire and Addison met, Jory’s birth, and the years leading up to the financial implosion. Cassella is a nuanced writer who skillfully sets up each scene and develops her characters and engrossing plot with care. We cannot help but sympathize with the overwhelmed protagonist, for whom no quick fix is on the horizon. Cassella sensitively explores the forces that keep families together and the misfortunes that can drive them apart. Although Claire adores her daughter, she is determined to keep her sullen adolescent in line, while letting her know how important she is to both her parents. A subplot about a Nicaraguan woman on a sad quest highlights how the haves exploit the have-nots in our society.

In fact, materialism is a central focus in Healer: How important is it to wear the latest fashions, have the most up-to-date electronic gizmos, and live in a fancy house? On the other hand, what is our responsibility to the poorest and most disenfranchised among us? Just as there are no cut-and-dried answers to these questions, Cassella offers no simple solutions to the problems plaguing the Boehnings. At least, the hardships that Claire endures help her grow from a dependent person to a self-reliant and strong-willed individual, who is no longer afraid to stand up for herself. It is always best to be prepared for the unexpected, Claire realizes: “The truth about life…is that you never know what lies around the corner.” With her strong second novel, Carol Cassella proves that her debut effort, the compelling Oxygen, was no fluke.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 38 readers
PUBLISHER:	Simon & Schuster (September 7, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Carol Cassella
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Gemini Oxygen

Bibliography:

• Oxygen (2008)
• Healer (2010)
• Gemini (March 2014)

“They’ve got business in a hundred countries. Counterparties up and down the food chain. They’re ten percent of the municipal bond market. They’ve got more credit cards than Chase. And they’re overweighted in mortgage securities. They’re the definition of systemic risk. And we’re barely out of a recession. It’d be malpractice to let them fail.”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte (FEB 9, 2010)

After reading Union Atlantic, one fact becomes increasingly obvious: Adam Haslett is one heck of a talented writer. But what might not be that obvious is that he is also prescient. His gripping novel essentially revolves around a large fictional bank (Union Atlantic)’s spectacular failure. Get this: Haslett completed it the week that a real-life bank, Lehman Brothers, collapsed.

Haslett has said that while writing Union Atlantic, he worried that no one would know what the Federal Reserve was, or “if they did they wouldn’t want to read about it in a novel.” He needn’t have worried. After all, life—in this case sadly—imitates art.

Doug Fanning, a young and aggressive banker is one of the higher-ups in Union Atlantic, a bank in Boston. A child of a single, alcoholic mother, who worked as a cleaning lady to support her son, Fanning leaves home abruptly one day to join the navy. After a brief but life-defining stint in the Middle East, Fanning leaves the navy and makes a meteoric rise to the upper ranks of Union Atlantic. Even early on, he is never shy of wearing his ruthless ambition on his sleeve, a quality that wins him a spot as a special favorite of the bank’s CEO, Jack Holland.

Interestingly Fanning’s ambition (and his emotional vulnerability) even shows up in his decision to build a mansion in Finden, a posh suburb in Western Massachusetts. His mother once drove to the same town to clean rich people’s homes here. He builds a gorgeous, state-of-the-art mansion on a beautiful patch of land. There is one problem however. His neighbor, Charlotte Graves, claims the land was sold to him illegally and that it belongs to her grandfather’s trust. She is determined to have her day in court and have the eyesore removed from the land she is so deeply attached to.

Once a history teacher in the local high school, Charlotte now spends her days with her two dogs, lamenting the slow decline of the American character and the country’s spirit. “The house was merely the furthest and most galling advance of the much larger intrusion, the one that had begun decades ago, first at a distance, a sighting here or there, a fancy stroller in the library stacks, a concern for caloric totals voiced over the meat counter,” she thinks. A staunch liberal, Charlotte abhors the kind of greed and avarice Doug seems to personify.

Also in town is Nate, a teen drifter trying to finish school. He signs up for tutoring lessons with Charlotte and instead listens to her rant endlessly about the America that she knows is lost. In Nate, Charlotte sees her lover Eric, who died very young from a drug overdose. Over the course of many weeks, Nate also gets to know Doug and develops a crush on him.

Back at work, Doug’s shenanigans with reckless money bets slowly begin to take a toll on Union Atlantic to the point where it comes to the attention of the head of the New York Federal Reserve, Henry Graves. Henry, as it turns out, is Charlotte’s brother. As the fiscal crisis grows, he increasingly plays a role in trying to tie all the knots together and keep the system afloat.

Haslett has said that he has been fascinated by the idea of the anonymous power that the Fed exercised and wanted to write about it. Union Atlantic tells the story of the bank’s collapse briskly and well. The factual details for the deals and exchanges get a little confusing at times, but it’s not a problem. You begin to realize that the finer details don’t matter as much as the fact that crimes are being committed here. Haslett keeps the pace moving trying to explain the details of the financial malfeasance as best as he can.

Haslett does an excellent job narrating the story from each character’s point of view. Small details are taken care of. For example, when Charlotte fills a pewter tankard with water and hands it to Nate, he says to himself the vessel looked like “something a knight might drink from.” Only a teen would think that.

The one weak link in the novel is Nate. As great as his character is, I didn’t quite get what purpose his narrative served. If it was to show Doug’s emotional complexities, as he gets increasingly involved in a precarious relationship, it serves its purpose. But often, Nate feels like a prop in the story, not fully there—only serving to augment one narrative of another character’s personality.

All in all though, Union Atlantic is one great read. Haslett has said that he hopes readers will not look at Doug as simply a stand-in for the avarice of the age. They probably won’t. But the entire novel, with its portrayal of small-town politics, corporate greed and the sad decline of American liberalism definitely feels like an accurate snapshot of our times.

Perhaps the novel’s biggest achievement is that it is so enjoyable despite the protagonist being such an unlikeable figure. Writing powerful stories where the reader can easily sympathize with the central character is what most fiction is made of. But it requires real talent to craft an absorbing story when the protagonist is so hard to like. When Doug once resents being judged, he says he could see that people “in their bootless, liberal refinement would judge him and all he’d done as the enemy of the good and the just.” But, he argues, these same people’s “high-minded opinions” were “just decoration for a different pattern of consumption.” You totally see his point.

It is to Haslett’s enormous credit that by the end of Union Atlantic, one can at least see what Doug Fanning’s motives are and feel badly for the smothering solitude he endures. Yes, one can argue that much of it is his own doing but you almost begin to like the guy. Almost. And that is an achievement that alone makes Union Atlantic such a fantastic and engrossing read.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 45 readers
PUBLISHER:	Nan A. Talese; 1 edition (February 9, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Adam Haslett
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: You Are Not A Stranger Here Another prescient novel about money: Human Capital by Steve Amidon

Bibliography:

• You Are Not A Stranger Here (August 2002)
• Union Atlantic (February 2010)

“Money,” he said wearily, looking out of window as though he was seeing a golden age go by.  “All the world is now convertible to money.  Power, influence, peace and war.  It used to be that the sole determinant was the number of men you could march out to meet your enemies.  Now more depends on the convertibility of your currency, its reputation among the bankers.”

Book Review:

Reviewed by Eleanor Bukowsky (MAY 18, 2009)

Iain Pears’s Stone’s Fall opens in France in 1953 with the burial of Madame Robillard, who passed away in her eighties.  The first part of the book is narrated by Matthew Braddock who had met Robillard (then known as Elizabeth, Lady Ravenscliff) when she was in her forties.  The year was 1909, and twenty-five year old Matthew was a crime reporter for a London newspaper.  Elizabeth summons Matthew a fortnight after the death of her husband, John Stone, Lord Ravenscliff, who died after he fell or was pushed out of an open window in his study.  She offers Matthew a great deal of money to look into her husband’s professional and personal affairs.  There are a number of questions that she wants answered:  Was Stone’s death accidental or a result of foul play?  Why did he leave a huge bequest to a child, whom, he states in his will, “I have never previously acknowledged?”  

Why did Stone grant a legacy to Mrs. Esther Vincotti of Italy?   After examining her husband’s papers carefully, Elizabeth finds nothing to shed light on these matters.  She tells Matthew that, even after twenty years of marriage, she and her husband were very much in love and that he had not been in the habit of keeping secrets from her.  That is why she is willing to pay Matthew handsomely to dig deeper and give her the information that she craves for her peace of mind.

Thus begins a lengthy narrative that moves backwards in time.  Pears takes us to London in 1909, Paris in 1890, and finally, to Venice in 1867.  Part Two is narrated by Henry Cort, a shadowy figure who crossed paths with John Stone and Elizabeth and knows a great many of their secrets.  Part Three is narrated by Stone himself.  The first part is not that compelling and some will be tempted to put the book down after the first hundred pages.  Initially, it is difficult to care about the deceased and his wife, about whom we know little, or about Matthew, who barely makes a living as a journalist.  Matthew eagerly accepts Elizabeth’s generous stipend, hoping to improve his lowly financial position.  However, when he starts investigating and finds anomalies in Stone’s business dealings, his curiosity gets the better of him.   What he learns shocks and alarms him, and his continued involvement in the Stone case will put him in grave danger.

Pears takes a huge gamble, expecting the reader to keep track of dozens of characters, some of whom are not what they seem to be, and an incredibly convoluted plot.  The author assumes that we will be willing to stick with a narrative that moves in many different directions, and that hinges, to a large extent, on arcane details of banking and politics; not everyone will finds this subject matter particularly compelling or comprehensible.  Does Pears’s gamble pay off?  Yes and no. Until part three, Stone’s Fall is a tough slog.  There is a great deal going on but, for quite some time, the point of it all is elusive.  It is only in the third section of the book that the tale at last comes to brilliant life.  We get to know Stone intimately, discover how he becomes a captain of industry, and watch him commit grievous errors for which he will pay dearly.  At last, this cipher becomes human and the final pages are riveting.  Many hitherto undisclosed facts are revealed, finally enabling us to make sense of what has occurred in the previous sections.  The ending of Stone’s Fall, although not completely believable, is deeply poignant.  Pears explores a number of themes:  Men who are familiar with the intricacies of making money and the inner workings of government wield enormous power (a timely topic in our troubled times).  Without love, wealth and social status provide scant satisfaction.  A person is revered after his death not for his power and influence, but for his good works, compassion, and personal honor.  Although determined readers will diligently plow through this dense novel, Stone’s Fall will, alas, bring less hardy souls to their knees long before they reach the final page.  Still, the magnificent part three almost makes the whole task worthwhile.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 8 readers
PUBLISHER:	Spiegel & Grau (May 5, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Eleanor Bukowsky
AMAZON PAGE:	Stone’s Fall
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Iain Pears
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Review of The Portrait Another review of Stone’s Fall

Bibliography:

Jonathan Argyll, Art History Mystery Series:

• The Raphael Affair (1990; 1992 in US)
• The Titian Committee (1991; 1993 in US)
• The Bernini Bust (1992; 1994 in US)
• The Last Judgement (1993; 1995 in US)
• Giotto’s Hand (1994; 1997 in US)
• Death and Restoration (1996; 1998 in US)
• The Immaculate Deception (2000)

Other:

• The Instance of the Fingerpost (1997)
• The Dream of Scipio (June 2002)
• The Portrait (April 2005)
• Stone’s Fall by Iain Pears (May 2009)

” ‘Get out,’ she screamed and wheeled round to me, her face ablaze, picking up the blue bowl from the mantelpiece. That bowl, the one she had used to humiliate me, to put me in my place. It served its purpose again, as it crashed into the wall behind me and shattered into a hundred pieces. She was terrifying. I was terrified.”

Book Review:

Reviewed by Kirstin Merrihew (MAY 18, 2009)

Iain Pears’ Stone’s Fall: A Novel traces back the lives of arms mogul John William Stone and his beautiful wife Elizabeth (aka Lord and Lady Ravenscliff), as well as others around them. The densely detailed novel opens in Paris in March of 1953 as a journalist attends a funeral and is given a package. This man, Matthew Braddock, then launches into his recollections of the momentous events he experienced in London in 1909 when, after the sudden death of John Stone, he was commissioned by Lady Ravenscliff to find a long-lost child who was bequeathed a sum in her husband’s will. Braddock, considerably younger than Elizabeth Stone, becomes quite smitten with her. At the same time, her secretive, strange actions spur suspicion in him. Had her husband’s fall from a high window been an accident or murder?

As Braddock tries to get to the bottom of these murky mysteries, a man named Cort also makes a shadowy entrance. In Part Two, this Henry Cort takes over as narrator from Braddock. Cort tells of his own initial meetings, in Paris in 1890, with John Stone and Elizabeth, the two of whom in turn met and began their courtship. And finally, John Stone himself (also through written record) explains his defining episode as a young man in Venice in the year 1867.

Elizabeth does not get an opportunity to tell her side of things. The reader must rely on the above-mentioned men for insight into who she might be at her core. It would have been fascinating to read her memoirs, but, then again, she probably wouldn’t and couldn’t have given an “accurate” portrait of herself because she lived on many levels and because, as Braddock observed, “She was always a good actor.” [Technically, Braddock ought to have called her an “actress.” The tendency to lose the feminine versions of English words established itself well after 1953.]  Elizabeth is, arguably more so that than her husband, the striking centerpiece of this novel; she is the more flamboyant of the two, the one, often, who draws attention. But they both conceal much from the world at large, and while they may have convinced themselves they knew the other, Elizabeth tells Braddock that they gave each other room to do what they thought they had to separately. Elizabeth and John are a literary couple one will not soon forget. She is far more than an alluring showpiece; she is an elusive and tempestuous force with which to be reckoned. Her life is one with many chapters, most not easily opened once they are closed. As Elizabeth explained it, she loved John because he was the one man she couldn’t control by sheer willpower and feminine wiles. John, a behind-the scenes capitalist of fiduciary genius and vision, for his part, declared, “I love Elizabeth more than anything else in my life….She could have asked anything, and I would have done it. She is my love.” Both husband and wife claim to find no faults in their spouses…a view through rose-colored glasses certainly, but touching. Readers can relish the opportunity to sink luxuriously into their convoluted lives and to soak up the intricately created ambience of the dangerous times (all times are dangerous one way or another) in which they made their marks.

Stone’s Fall recounts tales of financial wizardry and shell games; espionage among the restive and trustless European nation states forging industrial/military strongholds; and the vagaries of human love, lust and resulting violence. It is a novel that sometimes obscures its human beings with prodigious financial, legal, and other particulars that can even bore the characters. For instance, some readers may become a bit mind-numbed by the the nuts and bolts of financing a huge under-the-table undertaking. However, Pears’ fictional, deftly-layered reverse history will draw in and captivate anyone with the time and patience to take in the entire book (just as the author’s earlier bestseller, An Instant of the Fingerprint did so compellingly). Some may be tempted to stop after Part One which could, truth be told, stand as a complete novel. But persevere. The rest of Stone’s Fall immeasurably enriches the total picture, and Henry himself is revealed stunningly in the final section. Pears brilliantly supplies the coup de grace in the last few pages, so don’t, if you want to maintain the implicate suspense, read the conclusion before its time.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 117 readers
PUBLISHER:	Spiegel & Grau (May 5, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Kirstin Merrihew
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	None
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read another review of Stone’s Fall Review of The Portrait

Bibliography:

Jonathan Argyll, Art History Mystery Series:

• The Raphael Affair (1990; 1992 in US)
• The Titian Committee (1991; 1993 in US)
• The Bernini Bust (1992; 1994 in US)
• The Last Judgement (1993; 1995 in US)
• Giotto’s Hand (1994; 1997 in US)
• Death and Restoration (1996; 1998 in US)
• The Immaculate Deception (2000)

Other:

• The Instance of the Fingerpost (1997)
• The Dream of Scipio (June 2002)
• The Portrait (April 2005)
• Stone’s Fall by Iain Pears (May 2009)