HYPER: A Novel, the personal cost of being made stateless in a capitalist world

HYPER: A Novel
AGRI ISMAÏL
Coffee House Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$20.00 paperback, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A cutting, hypermodern saga of money, family, and survival for fans of Zadie Smith, Patricia Lockwood, and Mohsin Hamid.

When Rafiq Kermanj, founder of the Kurdish Communist Party, is forced to flee Tehran for London with his conservative wife Xezal and three children, they suffer the shame of penury and migration layered on Kurdish statelessness.

Agri Ismaïl's unforgettable debut novel follows the lives of Rafiq's children and their increasingly desperate relationship to money. Siver, the only daughter, escapes into an unhappy marriage in Baghdad before fleeing to raise her daughter as a single mother in Dubai. Mohammed, the eldest, stays in London to climb the unforgiving ladder of the financial sector. Laika, the youngest, retreats into a contactless digital life, designing the trading algorithms that will ultimately prove his downfall in a condo near Wall Street.

Siver's world is presented in sparse fragments of contemporary auto-fiction, freely jumping from past to present; Mohammed's in a hysterical realism reflecting London after the stock market crash; and Laika's in a kinetic prose that emulates the speed and rhythms of the internet, a new topic always a click away.At once a love letter to the systems novel and a subversion of the family saga, Hyper uses the unsettled nature of the Kurdish diaspora to capture the dislocations of life under capitalism. Equal parts heartfelt family story and razor-sharp satire, Hyper is an ambitious, thrilling articulation of life in the twenty-first century, marking debut author Agri Ismaïl as one of the most perceptive and exciting new voices in contemporary literature.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: An intense read, one that demands you consider the setting, the actors, and the milieu of each section before the read can fully settle in; the rhythm is there but you'll stumble a bit until you find it. It's surreal, it's non-linear, it's got the modernist quality of meeting its characters in their own emotional reality. It asks a lot of the reader in its three hundred fifty-ish pages.

The aftermath of the 2008 crisis was brutal. The richest got hugely richer. It's clear to the reader that the eldest Hardi son, Mohammed, is fully on board with this. He's in a trading firm that makes (until now) the richest richer. His PoV is a funny parodic echo of how those rich Brits speak; you know they would look down on him for his antecedents (an impoverished former Communist Party founder father? my dear...), for his non-U vocabulary and choices of subject. It's fitting that we meet him in David-Lodge-ian prose.

Sive, the only Hardi daughter, isn't thriving. Her convenient marriage to a wealthy Iraqi man collapsed when he decided to take a second wife. She left, she took her child and went to Dubai where she's resentfully eking out a living selling luxury goods to the massive winners of the 2008 collapse. She never really reflects on how her upbringing as the stateless child of social-change losers is being repeated in her own life. Siver reflects, in very spare almost elegiac prose on how women do not control their fates, how men are selfish, hoe children need need need but offer little, and so on and so forth. "You didn't love the man you left so where's the problem?" is my question for her. Not addressed, not in her awareness, only the sense (inherited from her genuinely aggrieved mother) that living her life cut into bits that suit a man not herself is unfair. It certainly is, Siver, and worth fighting not running from into a grey, cold fog of victimhood.

Laika, named for Laika, is probably closest to his bitter, defeated father in outlook. His world is as close to completely contactless as he can make it, like his economically and spiritually impoverished father who barely scrapes by as another stateless immigrant to the land whose brutal, ugly imperialism sowed the seeds of his bitter harvest. It's a tiny, tightly bounded world he's set up in New York City, only opening into the whole of the internet when he's online living a life that suits him. It's all funded by, well, hacking; using the system that's held so many in thrall, under misused power, for generations: he's used a shadow algorithm to trade in tandem with Goldman Sachs. Don't laugh...it's a personal debacle of biblical proportions. It's all told in the most difficult-to-read (for me anyway) prose that tightly focuses on Laika's narrowness and stuckness.

A Communist-Party founding dad with a religious wife produced these hypercapitalist, money-obsessed children. While we spend little time with Rafiq, we see in his fractured family the echoes of bombs exploded before he, let alone they, were born. The cruel and callous world of Empire (anyone's) broke these humans' spirits each in a different way. The hammer blows of being denied your identity as a group, a member of a group, or a person with agency to determine your own course all play out in Rafiq and his family. It does not end happily for them.

Author Ismaïl is a lawyer by training, those people whose profession is predicated on the ability to craft facts into a narrative that persuades others to buy into it. This is a very lawyerly novel, in the best way. It takes information (can't call them facts, exactly, when they're about fictional characters) that can be seen multiple ways...Siver's a gold-digger, Mohammed's a pathetic wannabe, Laika's a solipsistic nihilist...and gives them dimensionality, affords them nuance, build their bases out to admit of different analyses and impressions. Rafiq and Xezal never had a connection worth the name, now he's a downtrodden prole without resources...like the ones he wanted to save...she heads back to her home without him because she can. Come to find out she's not going home. It isn't home, the place; it's home, the state of being, that Xezal and Rafiq never had, never made. It's no surprise their Western-raised kids looked outside themselves to find a core strong enough to build on. And no surprise the entire edifice of family, built on slender reeds and sand, collapsed so spectacularly.

A powerfully affecting examination of the generational consequences stemming from capitalist, imperialist destruction, erroneously called "progress" and "stat-building" to distract from its cruelty and exclusion. I wished I'd had easier transitions between styles of storytelling used in recounting the siblings' life histories; it's a quibble, but it's the reason I can't finish out that fifth star. Just too big a ka-THUNK as I crossed each border.

FLORIDA PALMS: A Novel, Florida's tryin-to-get-by guys after The Crash

FLORIDA PALMS: A Novel
JOE PAN
Simon & Schuster (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The Outsiders meets Sons of Anarchy in this gripping debut about a group of young men dragged into a drug-running operation.

It’s 2009, the height of the Great Recession. Best friends Eddy, Cueball, and Jesse are fresh out of high school and wild at heart, but the economy is in the dumps. With jobs scarce along Florida’s Space Coast, they join a furniture-moving company run by Cueball’s father, a gruff ex-con biker who’s supposedly retired from the fast life. But when a mysterious old boss arrives in town, the payload is switched out, and the young men are coerced into shipping a new designer drug up the East Coast.

What is advertised as a bastion of brotherhood and respect quickly spirals into back-alley deals, bloodshed, and an all-out turf war that will test the bounds of love and friendship. Enticed by larger paychecks, and fueled by burgeoning drug habits, the young friends find themselves trapped between rank opportunists, warring gangsters, meth zombies, crazed bikers, and a blowgun-wielding hitman, all vying for a shot at the big time.

Soaring, ambitious, and deeply humane, Florida Palms is a gritty coming-of-age story with enormous heart and an unflinching vision of the violence and inequities facing forgotten communities. In a relentless race against desperate circumstances, the young friends must fully embrace the crime life or abandon their loyalties and risk ending up face down in the muck of the unforgiving swamps.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Violent and drug-addled, futureless and betrayed at every turn, the young men in this dreadful life of cat-and-mouse with the law (mostly unseen on the page, a faceless enemy), the rival outlaws, and each other, are dead men walking. There's no hope this side of the grave for any of them. It's a game they can't win. Or even walk away from. If you believe in free will, these guys make the worst choices imaginable...but honestly I came away from the read feeling pretty darn sure they're proof, all of 'em, that free will's an illusion.

Because if it isn't, y'all's controlling god is a rotten, evil entity.

Why read it, why finish it, why keep the misery fresh? Because the philosophical soliloquies coming out of these dead-enders' mouths are just *chef's kiss* and there's quite a number of 'em. Equally fun is the occasional character on the page reading CS Lewis or something equally unsuspected. Kaos and Cueball and Eddy, none of these guys made it out, or if they did it wasn't with everything they walked in carrying. The idea of their lives is to have more. And no one tells them "more" has no end, that's how the addictions they supply and live get their hold.

I think four stars is fair because, if it's not original, it's got honesty and clarity and it respects you as a reader. Joe Pan has put out poetry books before, and it shows. A first novel by a poet doesn't usually come this close to being a good story; it's more usual that there's less plot, more ornament. This is good description, good characterization, solid plotting, and only falls a bit short in the last 10%. I'm not sure how else to end it, though, so the fourth star stays whole.

Never a fan of Florida, I'm pretty sure it's not a far-fetched set of events or an outrageous group of guys, so I'm reinforced in my...less than fond...opinion, just as I'd hoped to be. If you're in the mood for some grit lit, here it is with a Florida twist.

CHASING GOLDMAN SACHS, a ten-year-old alarm bell that we all ignored

CHASING GOLDMAN SACHS: How the Masters of the Universe Melted Wall Street Down... and Why They'll Take Us to the Brink Again
SUZANNE McGEE
Currency
$4.99 ebook platforms, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: You know "what" happened during the financial crisis ... now it is time to understand why the financial system came so close to falling over the edge of the abyss and "why 'it could happen again.'" Wall Street has been saved, but it hasn't been reformed. What is the problem? Suzanne McGee provides a penetrating look at the forces that transformed Wall Street from its traditional role as a capital-generating and economy-boosting engine into a behemoth operating with only its own short-term interests in mind and with reckless disregard for the broader financial system and those who relied on that system for their well being and prosperity.

Primary among these influences was "Goldman Sachs envy" the self-delusion on the part of Richard Fuld of Lehman Brothers, Stanley O'Neil of Merrill Lynch, and other power brokers (egged on by their shareholders) that taking more risk would enable their companies to make even more money than Goldman Sachs. That hubris–and that narrow-minded focus on maximizing their short-term profits–led them to take extraordinary risks that they couldn't manage and that later severely damaged, and in some cases destroyed, their businesses, wreaking havoc on the nation's economy and millions of 401(k)s in the process.

In a world that boasted more hedge funds than Taco Bell outlets, McGee demonstrates how it became ever harder for Wall Street to fulfill its function as the financial system's version of a power grid, with capital, rather than electricity, flowing through it. But just as a power grid can be strained beyond its capacity, so too can a financial grid collapse if its functions are distorted, as happened with Wall Street as it became increasingly self-serving and motivated solely by short-term profits.

Through probing analysis, meticulous research, and dozens of interviews with the bankers, traders, research analysts, and investment managers who have been on the front lines of financial booms and busts, McGee provides a practical understanding of our financial "utility," and how it touches everyone directly as an investor and indirectly through the power–capital–that makes the economy work.

Wall Street is as important to the economy and the overall functioning of our society as our electric and water utilities. But it doesn't act that way. The financial system has been saved from destruction but as long as the mind-set of "chasing Goldman Sachs" lingers, it will not have been reformed. As banking undergoes its biggest transformation since the 1929 crash and the Great Depression, McGee shows where it stands today and points to where it needs to go next, examining the future of those financial institutions supposedly "too big to fail."

I RECEIVED A REVIEW COPY FROM THE AUTHOR. THANK YOU.

My Review: My 2010 review stands as written. It's not like Author McGee didn't warn us.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but does the world *really* need another book about The Meltdown That Ate Our Jobs? Do we *really* have anything left to learn about these greedy so-and-sos whose pursuit of their own profits gifted us with a huge expansion of the Federal debt?

In a word, yes.

Suzanne McGee (a good friend of mine) assumes that her readers are smart, savvy, and plugged in, so she hits only the highlights of the WHAT about the crisis. Her brief, as the subtitle of the book "How the Masters of the Universe Melted Down Wall Street...and Why They'll Take Us to the Brink Again" makes clear, is analyzing and explaining WHY.

She does this in as honest and non-judgmental a way as anyone could. She's not pointing fingers at one person per chapter, she's pointing up the systemic and cultural failings that, quite naturally and seemingly inevitably, led to a culture of no-risk gambling that permeated late twentieth century business. It took until the end of the Aughties for the chickens to come home to roost, but as they always do, they did. And who pays? All of us peons, that's who, which is exactly how the system is set up and remains set up to this day.

Her style is spare, unfussy, and dryly witty. Her story provides its own plot, so I can't say whether she's good at plotting. She knows how to give a telling detail!

"When {the New York Stock} Exchange is public, when people are willing to own it, it's a sign of a stable financial system, argues {a Canadian investment-firm billionaire}," who also owns stakes in publicly traded stock exchanges worldwide, from Europe to Latin America...The kind of push that come from shareholder-investors to become more competitive and efficient is the best way to make sure an organization is as effective as possible, he adds."

This comes in a book that traces "efficiency" as the principal author of the megadisaster of 2008...and does anyone remember May 2010, when the "efficient" robo-trading powerslide of the Exchange caused further systemic fantods?

McGee states, makes, and supports her points throughout this book with a lifetime's reportorial experience and a skeptic's "prove it" attitude. She's done the financially semi-literate a huge and signal service in writing this book. It's a good, involving, and deeply frightening read. Recommended to all who still think deregulation of any industry is a good idea.