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Summary
Summary
The eagerly anticipated debut novel from the author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist You Are Not a Stranger Here: a deeply affecting portrait of the modern gilded age, the first decade of the twenty-first century. At the heart of Union Atlantic lies a test of wills between a young banker, Doug Fanning, and a retired schoolteacher, Charlotte Graves, whose two dogs have begun to speak to her. When Doug builds an ostentatious mansion on land that Charlotte's grandfather donated to the town of Finden, Massachusetts, she determines to oust him in court. As a senior manager of Union Atlantic bank, a major financial conglomerate, Doug is embroiled in the company's struggle to remain afloat. It is Charlotte's brother, Henry Graves, the president of the New York Federal Reserve, who must keep a watchful eye on Union Atlantic and the entire financial system. Drawn into Doug and Charlotte's intensifying conflict is Nate Fuller, a troubled high-school senior who unwittingly stirs powerful emotions in each of them. Irresistibly complex, imaginative, and witty, Union Atlantic is a singular work of fiction that is sure to be read and reread long after it causes a sensation this spring. "Union Atlantic is a masterful portrait of our age."-Malcolm Gladwell
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In Haslett's excellent first novel (following Pulitzer and National Book Award finalist short story collection You Are Not a Stranger Here), a titan of the banking industry does battle with a surprisingly formidable opponent: a retired history teacher. Doug Fanning has built Union Atlantic from a mid-size Boston bank to an international powerhouse and rewards himself by building a rural palace in Finden, Mass. The land his house is built on, however, had been donated to Finden for preservation by Charlotte Graves's grandfather, and Charlotte believes she now has a claim on the lot. She may be right, and her disdain of modern decadence means bad news for Doug should she win in court. Meanwhile, high school senior Nate Fuller, who visits Charlotte for tutoring and Doug for awkward and lopsided sexual encounters, finds himself with the power to upset the legal and cultural war game. Haslett's novel is smart and carefully constructed, and his characters are brilliantly flawed. (Charlotte's emerging instability is especially heartbreaking.) This book should be of interest to readers fascinated but perplexed by the current financial crisis, as it is able to navigate the oubliette of Wall Street trading to create searing and intimate drama. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
New York Review of Books Review
WHEN the first wave of novelists began to tackle the post-9/11 world, many critics marveled (and some jeered) that they'd done it so soon. In 2005, Jonathan Safran Foer's "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" and Ian McEwan's "Saturday" were in the vanguard. Since then, new works touching on our jittery times have appeared with increasing frequency. And yet, almost a decade after the cataclysm, it can still strike a reader as portentous or premature when the somber shadow of that day falls across the pages of contemporary fiction. So it's with surprise, even incredulity, that you grasp, as you read Adam Haslett's first novel, that this book, set chiefly in 2002, not only tucks 9/11 into its narrative in an uncowed, offhand way but, to an extent, leaves it behind. Instead, Haslett tracks a different calamity: the global economic crisis that accelerated after 2001, propelled by bad mortgages, bad financial instruments, bad regulations and bad faith. As Doug Fanning, the protagonist (in no way a hero) of "Union Atlantic," curtly observes, recapping the trajectory that made him rich, the attacks on 9/11 "only sped the trend." So much for the halcyon pre-9/11 mind-set. This novel's narrative history doubles as news analysis. Fanning, a narcissistic bachelor, has taught himself to ride out adversity by refusing to be accountable for others. When, as a teenager in Massachusetts, he tired of his troubled mother's heavy drinking, he joined the Navy and dropped her cold. In 1988, on a warship in the Persian Gulf, he was among those responsible for a terrible military error, shooting down a plane with 290 civilians on board. Not only did he get away with it, he was awarded a combat ribbon. Back in America, Fanning has prospered by helping to turn a sound regional commercial bank - the Union Atlantic of the title - into a rotten global financial-services conglomerate. He has floated hundreds of millions abroad, imperiling the investments of unwitting citizens but increasing his company's earnings, to the great satisfaction of his boss, Jeffrey Holland. "The old compact" has changed, Fanning tells Holland, and the public's "old assurances" that government, business and the news media will respect their interests have expired. What matters nowadays, he insists, is to "focus on the bigger picture. . . . influence. Power over information. Control." His advice to Holland is blunt: "You take the advantage you can get." But if Henry Graves, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, were to find out about Union Atlantic's shenanigans, would he expose them or hide them? And if he exposed them, would the bankers pay a personal price for their abuse of power and the public trust? Recent headlines in the financial press could have come from the pages of Haslett's novel. In 2008, it has now been revealed, the New York Fed, then headed by Timothy Geithner, the current United States Treasury secretary, instructed the insurance giant A.I.G. to hide information from the Securities and Exchange Commission. Like the Fed chairman in Haslett's novel, Geithner (whose defenders have said he knew nothing of such instructions, that they were relayed by underlings) has plausible deniability. Unlike Henry Graves, Geithner isn't fictional - and neither is his situation. The eerie overlap of Haslett's narrative with current events in the American economy gives "Union Atlantic" unusual impact. This timely novel demonstrates not only how the financial crisis happened but why - by documenting the intersection of big, blunt historical forces with tiny, intricate, cumulatively powerful personal impulses. Businesses become too big to fail, Haslett suggests, because individuals fail one another, in a snowball effect. HASLETT'S first book, the 2002 story collection "You Are Not a Stranger Here," was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Each story in that moody, introspective book explored a different way that tightly wound lives can come unspooled. Haslett wrote in a variety of detached, understated voices, each aching in its precise registry of the minute gradations of emotional pain. It's remarkable how successfully "Union Atlantic" - so unlike the stories in structure and style, and so much broader in scope - continues the nuance of Haslett's earlier characterizations. The actors in this extroverted drama are closeted (or not-so-closeted) introverts. The screen of their surface behavior hides their obsessions and hopes, as well as their shame - just as the balance sheet of a shady debt bundle can appear spruce and clear while concealing a thicket of machinations. As the novel begins, Fanning has had a hillside near his childhood home in Massachusetts cleared in order to erect a sterile McMansion. His eccentric next-door neighbor, a history teacher named Charlotte Graves who was forced out of the local high school for excessive moralizing, despises Fanning and his giant house, but he assumes he can ignore her. Yet he soon learns that Charlotte isn't so easy to sidestep. Idealist to the core, an articulate defender of the Constitution and civil rights, she's also a kook who believes that her two massive hounds share her disillusionment with modern ways. One of the dogs channels the Puritan preacher Cotton Mather, the other is a canine reincarnation of Malcolm X. Charlotte has lengthy arguments with both animals about the decay of the social compact that Fanning considers defunct. Crazy? Maybe. She recalls a character from Haslett's "You Are Not a Stranger Here," an institutionalized woman who converses with an opinionated ghost. But Charlotte is sharp enough to suspect that the town didn't have the legal right to sell the land where Fanning built his "steroidal offense" - land that once belonged to her forefathers. She may be right, and she may be able to pursue her case. If she does, will she have the wits - and the tenacity - to defeat the forces of greed and selfishness arrayed against her? Charlotte still tutors the occasional high school student. One of these is a quiet senior, Nate Fuller, whose father killed himself the previous fall, after being unemployed for two years. Like the protagonist in Haslett's story "The Beginnings of Grief," Nate has begun to feel sexual desire for men in the wake of his father's death. Curious about the new place near Charlotte's house, which he believes to be unoccupied, Nate breaks in. When Fanning, returning, finds him there, Nate feels a strong instant attraction. "Terrified at the thought of what kind of person he was for wanting this," Nate can't resist the call of "enacting the fantasy of selfforgetting" with this macho egotist. Charlotte has attempted to awaken Nate's civic conscience, but after meeting Fanning the boy prefers to let it sleep, rationalizing that "losing his father permitted him this moral lapse. As if, in some grand ledger, his loss had earned him a pass or two." Many of the characters in "Union Atlantic" are more closely linked than is strictly probable. The high school kids Nate hangs out with include the son of Fanning's boss, while nutty Charlotte happens to be the sister of the New York Fed chief. And yet these overly convenient connections reflect a larger truth that obtains between Main Street and Wall Street: compact or no compact, the fates of both streets are entwined. In "Union Atlantic," swiftly and confidently, Haslett unwinds the ball of yarn that is the global financial crisis to reveal its core: a knot of ineluctable yearnings and individual needs. The calamity in Adam Haslett's novel is propelled by bad mortgages, bad regulations and bad faith. Liesl Schillinger is a regular contributor to the Book Review.
Library Journal Review
This is a timely and often deeply engaging debut novel by an acclaimed short-story writer whose earlier collection of short fiction, You Are Not a Stranger Here, was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. The novel begins slowly, as Haslett introduces his characters and sets his story in motion, but by midpoint, it becomes riveting. The year is 2002, and the villain at the heart of this story is Doug Fanning, a financier at an American bank who has built his career by cynically and sometimes criminally exploiting federal banking law. Fanning ends up leveraging himself into billions of dollars of debt, a situation that comes to threaten the viability of world financial markets (there are shades of Lehman Brothers here). Haslett handles this superbly, skillfully depicting the complexity and drama. He presents a fascinating portrait of high-level finance, where hubris and cavalier disregard for the law are kept just barely in check by a few sober, responsible civil servants working for the Federal Reserve. Verdict Recommended for readers of literary fiction.-Patrick Sullivan, Manchester Community Coll., CT (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Chapter 1 A plot of land. That's what Doug told his lawyer. Buy me a plot of land, hire a contractor, and build me a casino of a house. If the neighbors have five bedrooms, give me six. A four-car garage, the kitchen of a prize-winning chef, high ceilings, marble bathrooms, everything wired to the teeth. Whatever the architecture magazines say. Make the envying types envious. "What do you want with a mansion?" Mikey asked. "You barely sleep in your own apartment. You'd get nothing but lost." Finden, Doug told him. Build it in Finden. And so on a Sunday morning in January 2001, Mikey had picked Doug up at his place in Back Bay and they had driven west out of Boston in a light snow, the gray concrete of the overpasses along the Mass Pike blending with the gray sky above as they traveled the highway that Doug had traveled so often as a kid. It had been six years now since he'd moved back up to Massachusetts from New York. What had brought him was a job at Union Atlantic, a commercial bank whose chairman and CEO, Jeffrey Holland, had entrusted Doug with the company's expansion. In the years since, his salary and bonuses had accumulated in the various accounts and investments his financial adviser had established, but he'd spent practically nothing. "You're pathetic," Mikey had said to him once, when he'd come back to Doug's apartment for a beer and seen the college furniture and books still in their boxes. "You need a life." A solo practitioner, Mikey had gone to Suffolk Law at night, while he worked at a bail-bond office. He lived with his girlfriend in one of the new condos in South Boston, six stories up and two blocks east of the house he'd grown up in, his mother still cooking him dinner on Sunday nights. He liked to call himself a well-rounded lawyer, which in practice meant he did everything but drive his clients to work. A few miles short of the Alden town line, they turned off at the Finden exit onto a wooded road that opened out into the snow-covered meadows of a golf course, used at this time of year for cross-country skiing. They passed under an old, arched brick railway bridge and soon after reached the first stretch of houses. The town was much as Doug remembered it from the days when he'd driven his mother to work here: mostly woods, the homes widely spaced, with big yards and long driveways, the larger homes hidden from view by hedges and gates. When they reached the village center, he saw that the old stores had been replaced by newer clothing boutiques and specialty food shops, though their signage, by town ordinance, remained conservative and subdued. The benches on the sidewalks were neatly painted, as were the fire hydrants and the elaborate lampposts and the well-tended wooden planters. On the far side of this little town center, the houses became sparse again, one large colonial after the next, most of them white clapboard with black trim. They passed a white steepled church with a snow-covered graveyard and a mile or so farther along turned onto a dirt track that led down a gentle incline. A few hundred yards into the woods, Mikey brought the car to a halt and cut the engine. "This is it," he said. "Five acres. Up ahead you got a river. The other side's all Audubon so they can't touch you there. One other house up the hill to the right, and a couple more on the far side of that. Any other place, they'd put eight houses on a piece this size, but the locals ganged up and zoned it huge." Stepping out of the car, they walked over the frozen ground farther down the track until they reached the bank of the river. Only four or five yards across and no more than a few feet deep, it flowed over a bed of leaves and mossy rock. "Amazing," Doug said, "how quiet it is." "The town's asking for two point eight," Mikey said. "My guy thinks we can get it for two and a half. That is if you're still crazy enough to want it." "This is good," Doug said, peering across the water into the bare black winter trees. "This is just fine." The house took a year to complete: three months to clear the land, bury the pipes, and dig a foundation, another seven for construction, and two more for interior work and landscaping. For the right sum, Mikey oversaw all of it. By the time it was done, the real estate market had progressed as Doug had foreseen. After the tech bust in 2000, the Federal Reserve had cut interest rates, making mortgages cheap, and thus opening the door for all that frightened capital to run for safety into houses. The attacks on 9/11 had only sped the trend. These new mortgages were being fed into the banks like cars into a chop shop, stripped for parts by Union Atlantic and the other big players, and then securitized and sold on to the pension funds and the foreign central banks. Thus were the monthly payments of the young couples in California and Arizona and Florida transformed by the alchemy of finance into a haven for domestic liquidity and the Chinese surplus, a surplus earned by stocking the box stores at which those same couples shopped. With all that money floating around, the price of real estate could only rise. Before Doug ever opened the front door, the value of his new property had risen thirty percent. The first night he slept in Finden he remembered his dreams as he hadn't in years. In one, his mother wandered back and forth along the far end of a high-school gymnasium, clad in a beige raincoat, her hands in her pockets, her head tilted toward the floor. They were late again for Mass. Doug called to her from beneath the scrub oak in their tiny backyard. Its bark peeled away, he saw veins pumping blood into branches suddenly animate and forlorn. A priest waited in an idling sedan. In the distance, he heard the sound of a ship's cannon firing. Oblivious to all of this, focused only on the floorboards in front of her, his mother kept pacing. As the deck beneath him began to list, Doug rolled to his knees to break his fall. He woke on his stomach, sweating. The wall was an uncanny distance from the bed, the pale-yellow paint someone had chosen for it beginning to glow dimly in the early-morning light. He rolled onto his back and stared at the stilled ceiling fan, its rounded chrome fixture as spotless as the deck of the Vincennes on inspection day. Here he was, thirty-seven, lying in his mansion. Reaching for the remote at his side, he switched on the TV. .?.?. Israel denies Arafat request to leave West Bank compound, the CNN ticker began .?.?. Pakistan in discussions with U.S. to hand over chief suspect in murder of Wall Street Journal reporter .?.?. CT residents to pay $50 more per year for garbage collection after State Trash Authority loss of $200 million on deal with Enron .?.?. His BlackBerry began vibrating on the floor beside his keys; it was his trader in Hong Kong, Paul McTeague, calling. At Doug's level of bank management, most people relied on underlings to handle recruiting, but that had never been his practice. He insisted on choosing his own people, right down to the traders. McTeague had been one of his. They'd met a few years ago on a flight to London. A Holy Cross grad, McTeague had grown up in Worcester and learned the business with a specialist on the floor of the NYSE. A rabid Bruins fan, his conversation didn't extend much beyond hockey and derivatives. Twenty-eight and itching to make a killing. The human equivalent of a single-purpose vehicle. In short, perfect for the job. Usually Doug would have waited awhile before clueing in a new guy as to how he, in particular, ran the flow of information, i.e. avoiding intermediate supervisors. But he could tell right away that McTeague was his kind, and so he'd told him straight out: If you've got a problem and you're getting hassled, just call. Two months ago, when the head of the back office at the Hong Kong desk had left, Doug had installed McTeague as the temporary replacement, thus putting him in charge of all paperwork and accounting, and expanding the dominion of an employee with direct loyalty to him. The more raw information Doug could get stovepiped up from the front lines without interference from all the middling professionals, the more direct power over outcomes he wielded. "You're a genius," McTeague said when Doug answered his phone. "The Nikkei's up another two percent. Our economy's still in the tank but Japanese stocks keep rising. It's a thing of beauty." A month and a half ago, in early February, he and McTeague had been at a conference in Osaka. After one of the sessions, they had gone to Murphy's, the bar where the Australians pretended to be Irish. They were about to call it a night when Doug saw a senior deputy in the Japanese Ministry of Finance stumble in with a Korean woman half his age. The man shook his head in resignation as his young companion made her way straight for the bar and ordered a bottle of scotch. Interested to see how things would play out, Doug ordered another round and he and McTeague settled in to watch. The argument in the corner grew steadily more heated. The woman was demanding something the man didn't want to give, the Tokyo deputy apparently at wits' end with his mistress. Eventually, after being harangued for half an hour, he stood up, threw cash on the table, and walked out of the bar. That's when the idea had occurred to Doug: the young woman might know something. "Do me a favor," he'd said to McTeague. "Comfort the girl." And a good job of it McTeague had done. At some point after they'd had sex, the deputy's mistress told him that the Ministry of Finance had a plan. They were about to launch another price-stability operation. The Japanese government would buy up a boatload of Japanese domestic stocks, sending the Nikkei index higher and thus shoring up the balance sheets of their country's troubled banks. It was a classic command-economy move, using public money to interfere with the market's valuations. In the process, the Japanese government would hand a major loss to the foreign, largely U.S. speculators who had been shorting the value of their stock market for months. The operation, of course, was secret. And thus it was that in mid-February, Atlantic Securities, the investment banking firm that Union Atlantic had purchased and renamed two years earlier as part of its expansion, had become the one American firm to go from bearish to bullish on the prospects for the Japa?- nese economy. Under Doug's supervision, McTeague had placed large bets on the Nikkei going higher, using Atlantic Securities' own money. The resulting trading profits had been substantial and were still flowing in. It would be awhile yet before the Ministry of Finance's plan would become public and there was a lot of money to be made in the meantime. "So," McTeague asked, eager as ever, "how much cash do I get to play with tomorrow?" "We'll see," Doug replied. "Call me after New York opens." The chilled marble of the bathroom floor felt particularly solid against the balls of his feet. Two huge sinks in the shape of serving bowls, one for the master and one for his wife, were set beneath mirrored cabinets along the far wall. Beyond were two shower stalls with shiny steel heads that jetted water from the walls and ceiling. Opposite these stood a patio-size cross between a Jacuzzi pool and a bathtub, the whole thing decked in slate. Walking to the window, Doug looked out across the front of the house. Mikey had done a good job: a stately, circular driveway, an enormous freestanding garage mocked up like a barn, and, surrounding it all, pleasing expanses of lawn. Through a row of bare maples that had been left up the hill to mark the property line, he could see a dilapidated barn and beside it an ancient house with weathered shingles, a listing brick chimney, and a slight dip in the long rear slant of its roof. It was one of those old New England saltboxes that historical preservation societies kept tabs on, although not too closely by the looks of it. Whoever owned it didn't seem to be occupying the place. Weeds had risen in the rutted gravel drive. On the one hand, it was the farthest thing from a Mickey D's and a strip mall you could get, just the sort of nostalgia for which people loved towns like this, casting the dead starlight of American landed gentry, dotted with graveyards full of weathered headstones and the occasional field of decorative sheep. Allowed to decay too far, however, it could cause a decline in the value of Doug's property. If some absentee WASP who'd retreated to his compound in Maine thought he could just let a house rot like this, it would have to be sorted out. He'd put Mikey on it, he thought, as he slipped out of his boxers and stepped into the shower. Downstairs, he passed through the mansion's empty rooms and, finding the touch-screen keypad by the front door inscrutable, pushed an Off button and saw the screen announce: Fanning Disarmed. Mikey was good. He was very good. As he came down the front steps, the late-winter sun was just beginning to strike the side of his garage. Glancing over the roof of his car, he saw a woman in a blue ski jacket coming out the back door of the old house up the hill, which was apparently inhabited after all. Tall and rather thin, she had longish gray hair and a stiff, upright posture. With her were two large dogs, a Doberman and some sort of mastiff. It looked as if the animals were too strong for her, that she might be pulled down by them, but a yank of her arm brought them under control and they led her in orderly fashion along the stone path to the overgrown driveway. At first Doug thought she hadn't noticed him at such a distance. But then, as he was about to get in his car, she glanced in his direction, and Doug waved. She made no response, as if surveying an empty landscape. Rude or half blind, he couldn't tell. Driving slowly, he turned onto Winthrop Street and, lowering the passenger-side window, rolled up beside her. "Good morning. My name's Doug Fanning. The new place here--it's mine." For a moment, it seemed she hadn't heard a word he said and was perhaps deaf to boot. But then, abruptly, as if the car had only now appeared, she came to a halt. Bringing the dogs to heel, she leaned down to look into the car. The deeply lined skin of her face had the same weathered gray hue as the side of her house. Without a word, as if he weren't even there, she sniffed at the air of the car's interior; the Lexus he'd leased for the new commute was still pine fresh. "Trees," she said. "Before you came. All of it. Trees." And with that she stood upright again and kept walking. Excerpted from Union Atlantic by Adam Haslett All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.