The Dismal Science

Peter Mountford
The Dismal Science


Tin House, 2014

Vincenzo D’Orsi is a Vice-President at the World Bank and a widower. Once a year, the board of the Bank is going to Washington to discuss the Bank’s working directions, but for the most part these meetings are of a formal nature. Managers and bankers are going to share rumors, talk about their lives, just having a drink with old friends. The Bank operates almost by itself. a The meeting of the Bank falls on Thanksgiving, and Vincenzo spends holiday in the company of his daughter Leonora, who came specially from New York, where she lives after graduating from the prestigious college and working as a waitress in a cafe, and his closest - and only - friend Walter, a journalist of The Washington Post. Walter and Vincenzo know each other more than for 20 years, their friendship began with a short interview that Walter took from Vincenzo. Now both friends already are in their fifties, and they have worked at the same place all their lives.

Everything changes for Vincenzo after his meeting with Hamilton, an expert on South American direction. In Bolivia a new president was elected, and he is the opposition to the candidate backed by the Americans. Now Hamilton asks Vincenzo cut help to Bolivia, fearing that Bolivia would seek to escape from U.S. pressure. But Vincenzo refuses to fulfill the request of colleagues. Hamilton begins to threaten Vincenzo that he would lose his job, while Vincenzo in turn threatens to go with this story to the press. Communication with the press is secretly prohibited in the Bank, and both Hamilton and Vincenzo understand that it will lead to Vincenzo’s retirement.

By evening Vincenzo decides to summon his friend Walter and talks about the pressure on him. The next day, an article has been published, which also becomes a statement about Vincenzo’s resignation.

The Dismal Science is written in the third person, and its protagonist is no longer a young man, only taking first steps in the world of finance, but an experienced man with a midlife crisis, a dead wife and a troubled daughter. Vincenzo gradually reopenes his past: from gragmented memories we learn about the injury of his daughter, and then about the death of his wife. Fully spent his life on work and career, now 54-year-old protagonist realizes that he missed the family while he had it. Now the hero is trying to regain his private life, but does not know how. Amusing to read a few scenes in the novel where Vincenzo is given advice about how in today's world to date.

Mountford draws in his novel a complex character. Vincenzo is a strange, he is apparently a coward (he cares about his pension, he tells the bank lawyer to got to hell, but only after signing the contract, retaining his pension). The subject of confrontation of the world economy and the individual in the novel leads to the creation of a nontrivial intrigue: what really was the true cause of this challenge? Was it an impulse, temporary insanity, or clearly thought out move? What drives people to do making vital decisions? Can one person change the state of the world economy? The Dismal Science is a charming portrait of an egoist, and not just egois, but egoist with a midlife crisis.

Mountford particularly surprised me by the inclusion in the novel a black CIA agent (supposedly a CIA agent, because he officially doesn’t tell wether he is CIA and or another secret service), simultaneously parodying spy novels and inventing a new type of a CIA agent, who does not need a gun or a license to kill, enough to know how to intimidate.

Mountford with this book confirmed that he's a gifted writer: he writes books that are read with pleasure and long remembered.

The Virgins

Pamela Erens
The Virgins

Tin House, 2013

1979, Auburn Academy, one of the best boarding schools on the east coast. There come the main heroes of this book, Aviva and Seung, and Bruce Bennett-Jones, the narrator, a voyeur, a dreamer. He will actively observe a pair of lovers, and most of the action will take place in the mind of the narrator.

Bruce immediately notices Aviva among all the girls coming to Auburn. She is pretty, her appearance emphasizes her sexuality, and Bruce meets her, feeling a certain attraction to Aviva, although later he’ll tell friends that she is not his type. Aviva herself will react to the narrator with restraint: she will talk about her younger brother, who writes her weekly funny letters, about her parents, seemingly successful family in which there is no love. Bruce will try to kiss Aviva, but she won’t succumb.

Aviva chooses another boy, Seung, whose parents immigrated to the U.S. from Korea, a classmate of Bruce in high school in upstate New York. He's tall for Asian, athletic, broad but modest, not too pretty, and because of his origin, feeling second-rate - particularly compared with Aviva.

Shortly after the start of classes Bruce for the second time tries to get closer to Aviva at the boat house. Bruce thinks that fragile Aviva wants sex, and all nearly ends as a rape. Already stripped Aviva rebuffs brazen Bruce, and about this episode, neither he nor she ever will tell a soul.

Seung and Aviva start dating in front of the whole school, making out, kissing, irritating some and delighting others. Pupils find them a strange but almost perfect couple, jealous of their closeness and happiness.

The Virgins is an artful novel. With his plot simplicity, it is not that simple. From a narrative point, here too there is a double bottom. The narrator of the book is always in the background, as if to say: look at this couple here, they are the protagonists, I am just spying. But it's a trick: even though the narrator is not an unreliable narrator in the conventional sense of the term, you’d hardly call him reliable. Bruce saw with his own eyes just what everyone had seen: kissing in public, the arrival of young lovers, a fatal ending. Everything else that happened behind closed doors is only imagination of the narrator, not dirty, on the contrary, quite romantic, accurate, sensitive, catching not body desires but torments of the soul. These kind of torments are Bruce’s own: devoid of pure love, at least he on the example of the others can see what love is. But do not forget that Bruce is not a sympathetic soul, he is a voyeur, envious, lustful creature who is excited about these fantasies - primarily on the failures of others.

His villainy is easy to overlook because he almost did not participant in the events, but in fact he is pure love destroyer, killer of an ideal.

The death of Seung is known already by the middle of the novel, but it will not stop the greedy absorption of the book pages. And if the story is not too original, it is written with feeling, without dipping into erotica.

The novel is written by a woman, but its narrator is a man. And I do not quite believe that Bruce could so accurately convey the feelings of Aviva. The scene in the bus where Aviva feels the excitement of jeans pressure when the bus jumps:

“The bus sends its vibrations through the vinyl banquette seats and into her thighs. She tenses experimentally, shifts position. Her jeans tighten against her crotch. She feels herself contract to a sharp, sparking point.”

or her feelings with Seung in bed - all these fantasies of Pamela Erens herself, but not the narrator’s.

The Virgins, perhaps, will not open new grounds, but it is masterfully written, enjoyable novel.