The Odds: A Love Story by Stewart O'Nan
In one slim chapter, eight and a half pages
long, this accomplished novelist describes the unraveling of one
family's American Dream in the financial crisis that was strangling
the country as George Bush the younger left the White House. All the
chapters in this little book are named after odds; this one is called
“Odds of a U.S. citizen filing for bankruptcy: 1 in 17.” For Art
Fowler, and, apparently, one in seventeen others, the elements of a
perfect storm collide, as his easy success and comfortable suburban
life with grown kids and a slightly boring marriage run into greedy
banks, low borrowing rates, and corrupt mortgage regulators, as well
as his own hubris, denial, and unfounded optimism. Add in an
extra-marital affair, and a wimpy inability to accept his own
failure, and what do you get? A trip to Niagara Falls, of course, in
a last-ditch effort to save the house and the marriage by gambling
everything he's still got at the casino.
Look, I didn't think I'd be interested in a
suburban marriage-mortgage story either. But this is witty and pithy,
and full of a) insights into marital dynamics, b) unexpected plot
flips right up to the final moments, and c) absurdities that one can
easily imagine happening in real life. On the verge of divorcing Art,
Marion Fowler accompanies him on a road trip to the
honeymoon-capital-of-the-world instead, because, well, “She was
tired of moping around the house, waiting for the next bad thing to
happen. Maybe Art had the right idea—why pretend anymore? If they
were going down, they might as well do it in style.” Indeed, in the
chapter titled, “Odds of a black number coming up in roulette: 1 in
2.06,” she goes all in. “Yet instead of terrifying, their
recklessness was weirdly exhilarating, like the fights they'd waged
over [his mistress], elemental, all pretense of normal life
abolished, the false past gone, the future uncertain.”
This
is a fast read with lots of contemporary relevance, but what I
enjoyed most was watching these two staid middle-aged people discover
the devil-may-care attitude at their core.
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