Inside an outsider’s world (Greenwich CT, Manhattan and Shelter Island NY; summer before/months during the 2008 financial crisis, and aftermath): Weighing in at roughly 500 pages, The Little Racket makes a big splash, unfolding around the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression from a psychological angle. Actually five angles: five women whose provocative narratives constitute character studies. A privileged, complicated bunch ripe for book club analysis as they’ve either remade themselves or are hiding something.

Big in the sense that these women are as multi-faceted as the factors that led us to the brink of economic collapse in 2008. A financial meltdown and reshuffling that triggers their emotional volatility and instability.

A big setting – one of the richest communities in America. The “false wilderness of Greenwich” Connecticut, where you’re whisked to a black sedan-guarded mansion: the home of a very rich CEO of a “too big to fail” fictional investment bank, Weiss & Partners. Bob D’Amico is so big he’s earned (and relishes) the nickname, Silverback, which “makes him feel big.” This shadowy Wall Street world is so big and convoluted no one really understands its “intricacies and machinations” – a big part of the problem.

Big in its electrifying prose. Biting social and cultural commentary. Like the economists still trying to figure out what went wrong, these five women are not so easy to figure out. All emit a “Greenwich whisper,” but they’re not to be stereotyped as Angelica Baker’s keen prose presents them multi-dimensional and enmeshed like America’s financial system. And while her penetrating prose offers us a lot, it hints at more. Makes us stop and think about what these women are really angling for, what makes them tick. Since 99% of us have zero experience with this ultra-wealthy crowd, we’re intrigued. The novel grips in the vein of snooping inside their massive closets, out of curiosity not approval.

So it’s also a big diversion for this blog as there aren’t any characters who enchant us. Some you’ll feel sorry for, sad for, but none you’ll fall in love with.

Unless your idea of a wife (Isabel) is to be so perfectly put together you want to scream: will the real Isabel stand up, like the mantra of the TV game show, To Tell the Truth. Unless your idea of a mother is an “ice queen,” content with your fifteen-year-old daughter (Madison) feeling “like a spy in your own house.” Madison is convinced she knows more about her father than his own wife, blind ambition resembling a younger version of Ivanka Trump. Then there’s the nanny (Lily) caught between a simmering cynical dislike of the elite (she attended Columbia University on a scholarship; Ivy Leaguers all get their due throughout) and caring for her upper-crust charges. There’s also two featured girlfriends – Mina, Isabel’s and Amanda, Madison’s – thirsting to be consequential, when/if allowed.

Mostly, you’ll likely feel a range of averse or, at minimum, ambivalent emotions for this tony lot. For their detachment, grandiosity, backstabbing, recklessness, falsehoods.

Blame is a big theme. Who is to blame for the financial crisis? Fictionally, everyone wants to blame Bob. In real life, it’s not just Wall Street that bears all the brunt. What about the homeowners who took on the burden of mortgages they couldn’t afford? Risky for them, risky for the rest of us. For other causes, see:

Wall Street and the Financial Crisis

Similarly, Isabel, Bob’s elegant, “measured” wife consumes much of the psychic blame. Just because her house is so big there’s a separate wing for her and Bob doesn’t mean she should bar Madison and her eight-year-old twins (Matteo and Luke) from entering. Isabel is far from a hugger. She prefers to wrap herself in MOMA charity events and the like, leaving the heart of a family’s gathering place, the kitchen, feeling “as huge and cold and silent as a mausoleum.” Is it Madison’s fault her parents named her after one of ritziest avenues in America? Lily’s fault she’s the nanny but when catastrophe strikes she needs her mother?

You sense the denouement at the opening: the summer before the historic crash when the D’Amicos are vacationing on New England-ish Shelter Island, a ferry ride from Greenport on the Long Island Sound, at the passed-down beach house of Isabel’s parents, not good enough for Bob’s highfaluting tastes. Another author might have opened with Bob’s bank failure. Baker lets us absorb the portending for 65 pages of exquisite prose that leaves some cunning on the surface and the rest buried for safekeeping.

Safety is the name of the game for these uppity, insecure women. “Fragile bonds” mimicking the fragility of the markets. Everything is knotted up; we watch the unraveling. An enormous price must be paid for the enormity of greed and egregious behavior that allowed the dominoes to tumble down on Wall Street, right into the laps of these characters. Fairly? Unjustly?

With all the animosity, anger, contempt, and injustice to go around not all the prose is gorgeous, intentionally. Notable is the vulgarity released from Isabel’s tightly-pursed lips, coarseness unbecoming of her old money pedigree. (The others are new money seekers.) Which is precisely the point. According to my count, three times this woman of “steel” exposes she’s not who she purports to be.

Madison’s a lot like her mother. She has her “goddess features” and is stoically self-contained. A perceptive young lady but not perceptive enough. So when the undoing confuses her, she lashes out, rebels. A cry for help. Who is listening?

Lily and Mina are. Though most of the time these two are oh so cool to each other, resenting the other, both competing for the fickle attention of this flip-flopping survivalist’s universe, where no one really knows whom to trust, or quite where they stand. That includes no one really knowing what Bob has done wrong. Plenty of resentment floats about.

Lily’s betwixt and between. Generously (and appreciatively) employed by the family for years, her redeeming quality is she’s mastered how “to decipher Isabel’s moods to see how she could help the children to navigate around them, and then to withdraw.” We’d like her more if she too didn’t keep secrets, and take advantage when things fall apart. Her name befits lily-white Greenwich. Another anomaly for this blog. A lovely setting from the outside, but inside it does not enchant.

You may like Mina the best. She agonizes over the choices she’s made for a lifestyle disingenuous to her Long Island roots. But we feel she must be partly to blame for her estranged daughter Jaime begging to go to boarding school (Andover, of course) at fourteen. Her husband Tom, a Princeton alum at Goldman Sachs (a fierce competitor of Bob’s as in these two don’t mix well), seems to be the cause of force-fitting Jaime into Greenwich Prep where she didn’t belong unlike Madison and her so-called friends. Mina is forever choosing Isabel over Tom, clueing us in on her unhappiness.

Madison’s angst is the most painful. For she’s the most victimized, the most hurt. Devastated that people “gamble away the things they always told me were so important.”

Which brings us to today. Banks are bigger than ever. Who is heeding the warnings to break them up? This isn’t just an entertaining novel, but an important one. Some pundits think we’re headed for another Depression. This tale was never about a little racket, but a great big one.

Lorraine

Leave a Comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.