A dramady, The Financial Lives of the Poets is about a business reporter who quits his newspaper job to start a website that provides financial advice in the form of prose. Naturally, the site is called poetfolio.com, and naturally, it's a dud.
Out of a job, Matthew Prior suspects his wife is cheating on him, his mortgage company is threatening to take away his underwater house and his senile dad lives with him.
Through a series of desperate actions, including late night 7-11 runs, Matthew finds himself hanging out with characters named Skeet and Eddie-aka-Dave.
Desperate action builds upon desperate action, leading Matt to become a drug dealer (marijuana only, though) to get himself out of the financial hole he is in and to purchase a thousand dollars worth of lumber.
His actions may not make sense, but the plot and circumstances escalate where they do, oddly, make sense.
Despite its inventiveness (although Breaking Bad with its ordinary man becomes a drug dealer plot did air a year earlier), The Financial Lives of the Poets did drag on a bit.
There are many one-liners throughout to help move the pace of the plodding plot. The poems peppered throughout though, are tedious and after the first haiku, it was like, OK, I get it, cute - let's move on from the joke now...
Despite dragging on, I was invested in the protagonist and wanted to know what would happen to him.
The ending was not the miraculous Hollywood ending where suddenly, Matt finds himself gainfully employed, in great financial position to save his house, back in a loving marriage, and his father miraculously lucid.
Instead, the ending is real, touching and although not the perfect ending, provides hope. It is one of the better endings that I have read.
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