The lives of the main characters in this book swirl around a
remote hotel near Vancouver. This hotel
is the hub in which their lives briefly intersect, and then they scatter--mostly. Vincent, a confusing name for a woman, and
Paul are half-siblings, and Paul has landed at the hotel as an escape from a
death for which he was an unwitting catalyst.
Vincent, the bartender, catches the eye of wealthy Jonathan and becomes
his arm-candy but never officially his wife.
This oversight may be a good thing, as Vincent is running a huge Ponzi
scheme,
à la Bernie Madoff. Leon becomes one of Jonathan’s unfortunate
investors and eventually investigates Vincent’s disappearance, which the
opening of the book mentions somewhat nebulously. I enjoyed this book immensely, although
corruption and lack of conscience are the main themes, and I would have liked
some of the characters to have shown at least a hint of a moral compass. Also, the chapters surrounding the crumbling
of Jonathan’s pyramid are written in first-person plural, presumably by one or
more members of his spineless and greedy staff, and struck me as either a
knockoff or an homage to Joshua Ferris’s
Then
We Came to the End about a corporate layoff. Despite this quirk, their various reactions
to the authorities’ discovery of their fraud are priceless. They all knew they were committing a crime
and fleecing their clients but basically did nothing to prepare for the
inevitable collapse. I couldn’t decide
if they were in complete denial or were just deer in the headlights. Simone, the receptionist, is completely in
the dark until she has to buy four shredders.
Jonathan’s daughter tells Simone that she will escape the scandal with a
good cocktail party story, and I love how that prediction comes to fruition.
No comments:
Post a Comment