Books in Brief
Present Value: A Novel by Sabin Willett (Villard, 416 pp., $24.95). This fall Sabin Willett published an unexpected novel–and if you missed it before Christmas, now is the time to catch up with it. His two previous novels, The Deal (1996) and The Betrayal (1998), were both in the mystery-cum-business-and-law genre. Both were enjoyable, but neither seemed to aspire to be much more than a relatively well-done pop novel.
Present Value is different. Filled with satirical descriptions of life in the upper tiers these days, the book opens with a description of Fritz Brubaker pulling up to the ritzy private school to which he and his wife Linda send their kids. There’s one long line of SUVs, and each one stops and the parent hops out to escort “Precious Cargo” into the school. One minivan in the midst of the SUVs, he thinks, looks like it’s being held hostage. Not too long after, we see Linda in adultery with a fat, old partner in her law firm. Even before the four-minute act is over, she’s already checking her email. And Willett then shows her attempts to justify herself to her psychiatrist, who knows exactly how to milk rich women.
But Present Value is more than just a source of many good laughs. At three points we flashback to lectures in an economics course at Amherst in 1976, and those lectures are a vehicle for making points about economic value and its profound limits. Few of the original reviewers of Present Value–all of them laudatory–picked up the underlying religion in the book. There’s little on the surface of the book that would immediately point to it, but Willett is clearly presenting the book as an example of redemption. Fritz goes to jail for some insider trading that was actually done by his son, a fact that he refuses to reveal. When his son finally visits him in prison, Fritz tells him that he didn’t maintain silence to protect his son from jail. After all, in our age, the son would simply have been shipped off for a while to a therapist, and at most would come to the conclusion that he had been stupid. Only by seeing his father in jail could he actually come to understand that what he had done was not just stupid but wrong.
A somewhat forced plot contrivance–the introduction of a much younger woman, Ronnie, who is a private detective–provides the temptation for Fritz to betray his marital fidelity. But the issue is not just adultery, because Ronnie turns out to be “faithful” to him, visiting him weekly throughout his jail term (unlike his wife). So when he gets out, where should he head? To New York and Ronnie, or to Wellesley and Linda (who is now engaged in an affair with a creepy artist) and his children? Willett, for all the broadness of the humor in his satire, is not so blunt with his most serious points, and he doesn’t present the choice between Ronnie and Linda as a simple one.
Intellectuals, artists, and novelists have been in the forefront of modernity, and seem to enjoy nothing so much as undermining traditional ideals. That is why writers like Willett are so unexpected, so necessary, and so wonderful. It seems that there are people who can defend moral ideals and give us a bellyful of laughs in the process.
–Christopher Wolfe
Vale of Tears by Peter T. King (Taylor, 320 pp., $24.95). A terrorist cell makes three attacks in New York. The intelligence community receives information that al Qaeda, aided by an IRA splinter group, is close to unleashing a dirty bomb on the city. Sean Cross, a Republican congressman, uses his contacts around the world to put the pieces together before it is too late.
In Vale of Tears, the real congressman Peter King combines two issues he knows well: terrorism and Irish affairs. His expertise is evident in the storyline, and his writing draws the reader into the shadowy world of modern terrorism. With half of the book dedicated to 9/11, however, the fictional terrorist plot seems hurried and ends abruptly. Still, Vale of Tears provides a chilling look at the terrorist threat and also a glimmer of hope that increased vigilance might thwart future attacks.
–Cory Crocker
