Books: Interest rates and death
Recently, I realized that I am tired of books about death, and returned to Jade Chang’s The Wangs Vs the World. This book is funny, evocative, pointed. It’s not angry in a warping way. But it’s angry enough to be fun to read.
It is the perfect antidote to the poetic deaths of small fish and beloved pets in Mary Oliver’s poetry. It’s a kind of response to the murders, both nonfictional (the bombing of a murder victim in a barn in 1970s central Kentucky) and fictional (there’s generally a body in the violent Oxford of Inspector Morse). It has become my essential reading in the face of an entire book journeying back and forth through time but always both towards and away from suicide; a book opening with a drowning and haunted by the specter of SIDS; and a children’s book that is filled with the deaths of animals in a way that seems not to bother children.
When I couldn’t stand one more dead creature, frozen in a particularly hard winter, when even the death of a named goose was too much for me, I knew I needed a new book. So, I returned to a novel that I haven’t read in months. I needed to escape to a different world, and a benefit of reading many books at once is that I knew exactly where to turn: The Wangs Vs the World! I left them eating hotdogs in the kitchen of a desert trailer…no, I left them just as they headed onward:
”Even in failure, Charles Wang was a success. Looked at from one level up, from a perspective devoid of good or bad, where action trumped stasis, this was a perfect failure. Swift and complete…Charles had somehow tricked himself into erecting a needless deck of financial cards that went up only to be toppled by a historically anomalous financial tornado.”
My rich reward for returning to the cross-country road trip of a family ruined by the grand failure of a make-up company —and widespread financial disaster —by the third mention of interest rates in as many days! Interest rates in The Wangs Vs. the World! Interest rates in Lake Life by David James Poissant! Interest rates in Gary P. West’s Murder on Youngers Creek Road! Interest rates high, interest rates changing, interesting rates shaping our lives in mysterious ways.
Perhaps unfortunately for myself, I’m not excited about reading books about interest rates per se, and if I were, such a mention would be no more than expected. But getting three mentions in three books not about interest rates is one of the little joys of reading many books at a time.