S.J. Parris
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Adam Haslett
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Present Value: Summary and book reviews of Present Value by Sabin Willett, plus links to an excerpt from Present Value and a biography of Sabin Willett.
Present Value
by
Sabin Willett
Hardcover: Sep 2003,
416 pages.
Paperback: Sep 2004,
416 pages.
Fritz Brubaker and his wife, Linda - an attractive couple in their mid-forties - have it all. He’s a toy-company executive and she’s a million-dollar-a-year lawyer. Their children are in private school; they have a McMansion in a Boston suburb and a cottage on Nantucket. But their comfortable world is suddenly turned upside down when Fritz’s company’s stock tanks and he is arrested for insider trading. Linda’s image-conscious firm suspends her. Their houses get repossessed. The kids go haywire. Watching the Brubaker family’s lives unravel is the best way to see the stuff from which they’re really made.
This clever, very funny novel is a post-millennial snapshot of America that shows what happens to an economy built on greed when its chickens come home to roost. It’s the story of a family gone wrong, and its attempt to reset its course.
The author of two successful thrillers, Sabin Willett delivers in this ambitious new novel the kind of witty social commentary we associate with Tom Wolfe, Jonathan Franzen, and Zadie Smith. But he writes in his own original voice, breaking new ground as he describes a changed world. Present Value is a provocative, wonderfully entertaining ride—an irreverent, clear-eyed view of the way we live now.
Book Reviews
Booklist - Carol Haggas
A contemporary satire of the highest order, it delivers its message with both uproarious humor and uplifting pathos.
Publishers Weekly
... a clever sendup of striving citizens, and in the end, a morality tale, as the man who thinks he's lost everything discovers that perhaps he's won.
Library Journal - Sheila Riley
Highly amusing and irreverent, though at times a tad overwritten, this is a swift, good read and highly recommended for all fiction collections.
Kirkus Reviews
Remarkable hilariously nasty, morally driven, sweetly romantic. Poor Linda Fritz is irresistible.
Mario Cuomo Present Value is a really good story…and much more. It’s a trove of useful information about the law, the economy, and Wall Street, with intriguing insights into some of the flimsy threads of today’s culture and the sturdier values that can redeem it. Willett’s intelligence, sense of humor and craftsmanship are even more impressive.
Ken Auletta
Out of nowhere, this novel grabbed me by the throat and wouldn't let go until I finished. It takes you into boardrooms and bedrooms, it explores the post-9/11 psyche, the culture of business, pokes below the surface of a perfect marriage, and provides a comic description of the noisome Blackberry culture that leaves us staring at the tops of people's heads. Sabin Willett has the eye of a fine satirist, and the fluid writing style of a Tom Wolfe.
Kurt Andersen, author of Turn of the Century
If you love to hate lawyers, psychotherapists, political correctness, suburban oppressiveness, Blackberrys, CEOs, and/or CFOs; if you have a taste for tales of corporate intrigue told from the inside out; or if you enjoy dead-on 21st century comedies of manners, then Present Value is your book.
What drives a man to stay in a marriage, in a job? What forces him away? Is love or conscience enough to overcome the darker, stronger urges of the natural world? The Unnamed is a deeply felt, luminous novel about modern life, ancient yearnings, and the power of human understanding.
Someone gives you a dangerous puzzle to solve, one that may kill you or someone else, and you're about to fail... And there is no other option. No one who can help. No one but the Bricklayer.
A story that feels mythical or folkloric, that is driven by a mystery, throbs with tension, and ends in conflagration. Ruby’s Spoon combines a gritty, hypervivid realism with the dreamlike richness of a fable.
The challenge of writing a biography on Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis is that everyone knows the basic plot: a love of horses, suffered from her ...
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I can't quite understand the one bad review, as this is absolutely one of the best books I've read lately...and I've read plenty of good books. The ...
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Greetings everyone who goes on this website.
This book was AMAZING. And I ain't no fluent reader nor spelling and writer for heaven sake I'm a ...
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Present Value
Booklist - Carol Haggas
Mario Cuomo
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