Through baseball, finance, media, and religion, Beha traces the passing of the torch from the old establishment to the new meritocracy, exploring how each generation’s failure helped land us where we are today.
Beha is excellent at establishing his characters as representatives of particular intellectual worldviews; he doesn’t have to pin them down because they keep trying to do it to one another ... an impressive performance. Beha writes like an insider about a wide range of human experiences ... Sometimes the architecture of the plot seems grander and more elaborate than the story housed in it requires — about a family forced to re-evaluate itself as vitality shifts from one generation to the next. There are coincidences, chance encounters, faith healers, high crimes, medical emergencies and other disasters. The argument against analytics is really that there’s something human and elusive the numbers can’t account for, but the improbable here ends up scoring a lot of points ... There are also moving passages of carefully rendered points of view ... the kind of long novel that begins to occupy its own time zone in your life: Like a trader who has to wait for some foreign market to open, you keep returning to this world, waiting for fresh news.
Beha brings to messy life a post-9/11 New York City in a character-rich novel that’s funny, poignant, prescient, and somehow sweetly deft in the willing suspension of disbelief as a syzygy of coincidences careens toward a perfect storm.
... moving and pleasurable ... the book skillfully links characters trying to regain their balance in a world where their lives, like ours, have been radically disrupted ... Any novel that begins with an apocalyptic prophecy summons the feel of Chekhov’s first act gun, but Beha is up to the challenge ... The ambitions, passions and neuroses of these characters become the ingredients for a hearty stew of concealment, betrayal, manipulation and longing that Beha patiently brings to a boil. The machinations of this cleverly plotted novel are too numerous to summarize in a way that’s even remotely useful, but they’re united by a timeless theme ... Beha also seamlessly connects his characters to headline-grabbing events of recent years. Whether it’s the scandal-tarnished celebrity seeking redemption after a precipitous fall from grace, the inside trader or the plagiarist, there’s a certain roman-à-clef quality to the story that adds unobtrusive spice. In its breadth and ambition, Beha’s novel sits comfortably aside contemporary portraits of New York City ... But for all its immediacy, there’s also a timeless feel that evokes Dickens or Dostoevsky ... a sumptuous novel that calls insistently to the reader to return to it in those moments when it’s put aside, fueled by the elemental desire simply to find out what’s going to happen next. Beyond his mastery of the storyteller’s craft, Beha seriously engages with a range of moral quandaries that make the book much more than a page-turner with literary pretensions: What does it mean to be a good person? How do we measure the enduring worth of a life? Can good emerge from a great wrong? These questions and others tug at us while we’re reading and linger in the mind long after we’re done.
