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Present Value: A Novel [Hardcover]

Sabin Willett (Author)
4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)


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Book Description

September 2, 2003
Fritz Brubaker and his wife, Linda—an attractive couple in their mid-forties—have it all. He’s a toy-company executive and she’s a million-dollar-a-year lawyer. Their children are in private school; they have a McMansion in a Boston suburb and a cottage on Nantucket. But their comfortable world is suddenly turned upside down when Fritz’s company’s stock tanks and he is arrested for insider trading. Linda’s image-conscious firm suspends her. Their houses get repossessed. The kids go haywire. Watching the Brubaker family’s lives unravel is the best way to see the stuff from which they’re really made.
This clever, very funny novel is a post-millennial snapshot of America that shows what happens to an economy built on greed when its chickens come home to roost. It’s the story of a family gone wrong, and its attempt to reset its course.
The author of two successful thrillers, Sabin Willett delivers in this ambitious new novel the kind of witty social commentary we associate with Tom Wolfe, Jonathan Franzen, and Zadie Smith. But he writes in his own original voice, breaking new ground as he describes a changed world. Present Value is a provocative, wonderfully entertaining ride—an irreverent, clear-eyed view of the way we live now.

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Willett (The Betrayal; The Deal) offers a satiric portrait of suburban privilege and privation in the new millennium. Fritz Brubaker is an executive at Playtime, a Fortune 100 toy company; his wife, Linda, is a successful corporate attorney. Armed with Ivy League degrees and with their two children in tow, they zip through the smartest neighborhoods in the smartest vehicles, tethered to one another and the world through cell phones, beepers and, especially, Blackberry PDAs. But life veers off its smooth, comfy road when Playtime's stock value plummets, and Fritz is arrested for insider trading. Linda, who has been having an affair with one of her firm's partners (and discussing it with her therapist, Dr. Schadenfrau, who really couldn't care less), attempts to understand the change in Fritz. Always somewhat indolent, he now seems almost malevolently perverse: he demands she turn off her Blackberry while they're talking, for example, and questions the assumed values of their lives. Then Linda is forced to take a leave of absence and the wolves start howling around the door; soon Fritz is on his way to prison while the lawyers, accountants and even the U.S. Senate grapple with Playtime's financial disaster. Willett's detailed knowledge of legal and financial machinations is complemented by his snappy, fresh prose style, his sharp wit and his ability to draw compelling characters (even when they're rather despicable). It's a clever sendup of striving citizens, and in the end, a morality tale, as the man who thinks he's lost everything discovers that perhaps he's won.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Deserved comparisons to Jonathan Franzen and Tom Wolfe will win Willett loyal fans as he captures the early-twentieth-century zeitgeist, with all of its glorious and infamous exigencies, as unerringly as any eyewitness and as trenchantly as any pundit. With similar zest, glee, and sardonic wit, he introduces us to uber-achievers Fritz Brubaker and his wife, Linda LeBrecque, and their equally plugged-in kids. He's a Fortune 500 financial wunderkind; she's the company's high-powered attorney, and they live the good life, replete with luxury SUVs, posh day schools, frenzied e-mails, and ubiquitous PDAs. When their have-it-all-and-keep-it-at-any-price lifestyle suddenly evaporates amidst Fritz's conviction on an Enron-esque insider-trading scandal and Linda's law firm suspension, the family must adjust to its dramatically reduced circumstances and reevaluate their priorities. This common theme finds uncommon treatment under Willett's keenly observant eye as he cynically but rigorously comments on the nascent century's most ludicrous and momentous issues. A contemporary satire of the highest order, it delivers its message with both uproarious humor and uplifting pathos. Carol Haggas
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Product Details

  • Hardcover: 416 pages
  • Publisher: Villard; 1ST edition (September 2, 2003)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1400060869
  • ISBN-13: 978-1400060863
  • Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.5 x 1.3 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
  • Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,555,391 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

 

Customer Reviews

19 Reviews
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4 star:
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3 star:
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2 star:    (0)
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Average Customer Review
4.5 out of 5 stars (19 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Everything A Man In Full Should have been., September 4, 2003
By A Customer
This review is from: Present Value: A Novel (Hardcover)
This is a smart funny cruel book about the loathsome rich and the geek lawyers who serve them. A perfect cultural referent to early 21st century America-captures the mood post-September 11 and mid-Enron. Career-driven blackberry-sporting soulless seniorpartners, rich kids, the professional bankruptcy industry and corporate executives to whom ethics must be a vaguely distasteful foreign idea all take it on on the chin There is some silly naming (The main law firm is "Elboe, Fromme $ Athol" certain Washington characters are named after Shakespeare's Henry IV characters and the 2002 Red Sox are represented by goats) which is not distracting enough to detract from the story. This is the book Tom Wolfe must have wished he wrote. Also some good simple descriptions of how complicated financial transactions work.
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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Great book, not so great ending, October 14, 2003
By 
This review is from: Present Value: A Novel (Hardcover)
I would really give this 4 1/2 stars were I able. I loved every page in this book until the last few. The ending left me feeling as if there should be more. It was too pat, almost contrived, a bit as if the author were pressed to simply end it. But the author's descriptions of corporate life (non-life is more accurate) are right on and his depiction of the frustrated company president as he grasps to hang onto his options is hysterical, especially in light of all the Enrons, Worldcoms, and SEC scams we read about daily. It's very scary to realize this is a true account of a fictional company, that a company's lifeline is so connected to the stock market that a series of planned but nefarious trades could be its permanent downfall.

I disagree with a previous reviewer who didn't understand the presence of Ronnie in the story. This book is significantly deeper than one would initially believe. Ronnie is the road that could be taken. I highly recommend this book.

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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Satire? Naw, reality!, January 31, 2005
This review is from: Present Value: A Novel (Hardcover)
Wow, he nailed it. If you ever worked for a large corporation, particularly at the executive level, you KNOW these people. Yeah, Willet trashes the CEO and portrays him as a self-centered incompetent, but he couldn't have built a company that successful without a brain and some astute politicing. But all the ladder-climbing, and ass-covering, and back stabbing, and greed, and...he got it right.

Sent a copy to my Father-in-Law and he dropped it at about page 100, just when it really getting good. Said it was too negative. He does lambast corporate excess and people that think good and bad are the same as right and wrong. But the plot is interesting, the characters well developed, and emotions and dialogu well played.

I loved it.
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Inside This Book (learn more)
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First Sentence:
HEAT! The heat was steamy and suffocating, a humid pall that anticipated the dawn and left everyone a little sluggish, a little vulnerable. Read the first page
Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
belly pie, senior assistant controller, wet ashtray, absolute priority rule, financial guys, remote wireless, door number one, posthole digger
Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Peter Greene, New York, Fritz Brubaker, Chaney School, Deer Path, Larry Jellicoe, Marvin Rosenblatt, Don Fink, United States, Judge Chandler, Wall Street, Saul Herzog, Senator Oldcastle, Jimmy Civiletti, Professor Vorblen, Michael Brubaker, Prentiss Wolcott, Suave Milt, Jack Oldcastle, Action Men, Evelyn Moakley Bridge, Frank Pitts, Old Number, Ralph Moldy, Farm Street
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