Customer Reviews

A Week in December

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

This is a great book, well written, poignant, funny. I don't want to go into the details of the plot too much because it will spoil the book for readers. The characters range from a mixed race tube train operator, whose father abandoned her mother when she was 5, to a multibillionaire hedge fund manager, a second generation Pakistani boy wrestling with his identity and flirting with Islamofascism. Also a pompous negative Oxford educated book reviewer and a failed barrister thrown in for good measure. I am a lawyer and can tell you that the picture of the hedgefund manager and his shenanigans is spot on. Sebastian Faulks also wrote Birdsong, another wonderful book. One of the best books I have read in years and I read A LOT.

Seven days, seven characters, seven lives that nearly intersect but don't quite -- this is the way Sebastian Faulks tells his latest story. The main focus is on a cold character who manages a hedge fund, one of those shadowy capitalists who live only to make money. As with many characters of this ilk, he has a wonderful family that he neglects and no clue about what has real value in his life.

John Veals already has more money than he and 20 clones could spend, but amassing more fortune isn't what drives him. It's beating the system. And since he's been so good at it, the stakes keep getting higher. He gets more sanguine about what his amoral plotting may do to innocent people and the world economy (his deputy feels the same way). Meantime, his teenage son displays his heritage only by becoming more jaded about how much pot he smokes and how much time he spends watching a reality show featuring genuinely mentally ill people. The boy's only other pastime is spent in on online world.

This same online world is fascinating to an Underground train driver. Jenni appears to enjoy her job where it is calm and quiet and she's in control, much as she is in control of her online persona. Not even a sponging brother or a jumper phase her. One of her passengers is a young Muslim man who gradually becomes more disenchanted with the West, even as his father gets ready to be presented to the queen after being named on the latest Honours List. To prepare, he hires a tutor to educate him about literature. He finds the drippiest old toad of a reviewer who clings to the farthest edge of the British literary world.

And so on.

Unlike, say a Kate Atkinson novel where the various storylines connect, these characters barely bump up against each other. Their storylines doesn't intersect the way it initially appears they might. And the focus soon turns to whether Veals will be able to pull off his latest scheme to play fast and loose with the world's financial markets.

Although each character's story has a resolution, Faulks is more interested in reporting, in creating a story of "it is what it is". And in a real world where the actual Dow Jones plunged 1,000 points in May because a Citi trader hit "b" for billion instead of "m" for million, it's easy to see how a schemer such as Veals is tempted daily to take the money and run. His tracks are practically covered for him in this era of shadow markets, derivatives and deregulation.

While this writing strategy lends itself to inferring commentary, it also weakens that commentary and so does not add up to much. Faulks deals with some important issues on both global and familial scales. And he creates intriguing characters, from the sniveling book critic (who reminds me of that odious the Rev. Mr. Collins in Pride and Prejudice) to an earnest young lawyer reading the Koran in a freezing bedsit. But as crucial as characters are, and as worthwhile as certain issues and themes are to explore, they do require a plot worthy of their potential. This is where A Week in December falls flat. It's not a complete failure, but it isn't a great book. And it could have been.

I have a particular fascination with books that move among multiple points of view, interweaving the characters' mini-plots into one well-crafted whole. Overall, Sebastian Faulks's latest novel, A Week in December, successfully does just that. With tongue firmly in cheek, but also with a good amount of affection for all of his characters, Faulks gives us a well-rounded but satirical view of contemporary London society: the good, the bad, the ugly, the charming, and the misguided.

Two potentially disaster-creating characters--hedge fund owner John Veals and would-be terrorist Hassan al-Rashid--take center stage, and while their stories are indeed fascinating, they push the others' (some of which I found much more interesting) into the background. If the novel has one fault, it may be that there are a few too many threads in the plot, and, as a result, some characters get shorted. I wanted to know more about Jenni Fortune, the book-loving tube conductor who is addicted to an online role-playing game, and her blooming romance with barrister Gabriel Northwood; I wanted to learn more about Gabriel's schizophrenic brother Adam; about the senior al-Rashids; about Spike, the Polish soccer player, and his girlfriend, Olya, who poses for online porn.

The novel also runs the reader through the full emotional gamut. Perhaps the most satisfying moments for me were those that reflect on books, reading, academia, and the world of competitive literary prizes. Faulks is at his satirical best here. As an educator, I was particularly amused by a small incident, the book reviewer R. Tantor being hired (undercover, of course) by a school to write comments on students' papers, a way of appeasing the parents who complained that the teachers themselves couldn't even spell. And I was highly amused by Trantor's observation that technology has managed to make ignorance not only acceptable but an asset. He's a cranky old bird who gets his comeuppance in the end, but his perceptions are often right on target.

A Week in December is sharp, entertaining, and complex. It's one of those rare books that I will likely read again one day, because I feel that I might have missed something.

Perhaps the most time honored shibboleth of the writing trade is the injunction to show, not tell the reader what is happening. Virtually every aspiring writer who has submitted a work to a creative writing instructor, a visiting author, or a writer's workshop, has received it back with that injunction scribbled across the front page. Showing is hard. Telling is easy, which is why so many bad writers do it.

What is surprising, and disappointing, is how many erstwhile good writers have descended to this sort of literary sloth of late. Consider Louis de Bernieres, who followed up one of the finest novels ever written, "Birds Without Wings," with one of the worst, "A Partisan's Daughter," a sophomoric sex fantasy whose puerility was marred, if that is possible, by the long-winded narrator who told, told, told, and rarely showed anything worth remembering.

Or Richard Russo, once an intriguing writer with potential, who let success go to his head. Sometimes it's bad when Paul Newman falls in love with your work. Russo hasn't written anything good since Empire Falls, which was arguably his most complete novel. Since then, "Bridge of Sighs" brought me to tears, or boredom and rage. I cut Russo some slack since I've followed him from his uneven but promising "Mohawk." Then he churned out "That Old Cape Magic," where once again, enchanted by sloth, the author told us everything, and showed virtually nothing.

Which brings us to Sebastian Faulks' "A Week in December." A challenging and provocative concept, to portray a wide range of characters, from different social, ethnic, racial, cultural and economic strata, to bring them together within the confines of a single week, and jumble them together like raffle tickets in a drum, then to see what comes out.

The week's focus is a dinner party hosted by Sophie and Lance Topper to celebrate his recent election to Parliament. I didn't have a problem with Faulks' reliance on the shopworn device of using Sophie's deciding on seat assignments to introduce the various characters and their personalities. It was trite, and overly simplistic, but sadly, one of the strongest sections of the book. Also, by bookmarking that page, the reader would always have a reference for figuring which character Faulks was yammering on about later in the novel.

There were some compelling subplots, and frequent flourishes by which Faulks could show himself no slacker at pop cultural acquisition. There were ham-handed attempts at social commentary and cultural criticism, though they were too often marred by an adolescent penchant for altering names, e.g. Goldbag instead of Goldman Sachs, and Moregain instead of Morgan, (though later Faulks seemed to favor Merrill Lynch as the underlying establishment).

However, what comprised the bulk of the novel was a whole lot of telling, and precious little showing. As the week (and book) wore on, the lines drawn from character to character became ever more tightly interwoven, and the climax ever more apparent. With the steady unwinding of the plot, and the wry enmeshing of the several movable parts, the climax became an anticlimax. By the time the end came near, when everyone was either at the party or in the vicinity of the inevitable disaster, through plot manipulations worthy of Ian MacEwan in "Solar," Faulks couldn't even follow through on what he had set in motion. He blinked, and the novel limped to its limpid conclusion.

Not that the ending mattered, though. The reader has to wade through so many long, encyclopedic descriptions of each character's formative years, crucial crises and critical decisions, of choices made or declined, opportunities seized or lost, that long before the end he has stopped caring about them. It is clear that Faulks has fallen in love with his own prose, and has become a sufficiently "important" writer than none dare edit him. It's a pity he couldn't have taken Ernest Hemingway's advice about self-editing, in which he maintained that the true thing you know but do not tell makes the story that much stronger.

There was nothing Faulks knew that he didn't tell, and sadly, much of that rang false. It's sad to see so much talent go so badly wrong. I suppose in many ways Sebastian Faulks is the 2009 New York Mets of literature.

While there are many, many characters in this very timely look at modern London (the modern world in general really, but with London as the example), to me there were only two main tensions in the novel: an imminent terrorist attack and a planned financial maneuver. Both are introduced early on and are not resolved until the last pages of the book. The rest of the book is a glance in to the modern lives of sometimes-interesting-and-sometimes-not characters, many empty to some degree or another, but what kept me reading was the twin journeys of the terrorist and financial attackers. The ending itself is the most haunting I have read in a long time, and worth the read to get to it.

The whole book, for me, was about finding meaning in the emptiness of modern life. All the characters are either looking for meaning in a way, reacting to perceived meaninglessness, or reveling in the meaningless of it all. Reality TV, blogging, social networking sites like MySpace and Second Life, the ridiculously rich, and especially financial traders all take a hit in this book, or at least a swipe. The stock market and those who work in and around it come off the worst, and rightly so if there is any accuracy to Faulk's portrayal of hedge fund managers, banks, etc. From listening to NPR and reading Matt Taibbi's articles in Rolling Stone, I fear Faulks is right on about this stuff.

Sebastian Faulks' elegant "A Week in December" is fashioned after George Kaufman-Edna Ferber's brillant play "Dinner at Eight". A formal dinner party is planned for wealthy and privileged coupled and individual guests. Each guest has a detailed back story. The most disturbing of the guests are the Veals. One John Veals, the head of a hedge fund company, ruthlessly engineers out of thin air the downfall of a multi-billion dollar bank. The bank has done nothing wrong and thousands of people will be out of work but that is of no concern to Veals. Another toxic guest is a poisonous book critic who sets out to destroy every contemporary writer whose work is unlucky enough to cross his desk. Other guests include an endearing magnate Pakistani couple with a confused son caught up in a terrorist plot.

I was impressed by the range of research Mr. Faulks gathered to craft his story. He handled deftly with humor the subjects of Islam, hedge fund management, general finance, terrorism, wealth, greed, and biographical criticism. Good job.

A truly compelling storyline integrating all the main headline aspects if 21st century society in the developed world

With main characters such as a very well-researched hedge fund manager, a disenfranchised youth chasing after fundamentalism, a dysfunctional reality-tv watching teenager with a drug habit, and a peek into the true livelihood of Londoners who didn't make it onto the property ladder before the recent silliness happened.

This book is a great read and offers a fantastic depiction of how lost one could argue Londoners really have become. Well worth it!

This is tour-de-force writing. Four - or is it five? - threads follow a disparate group of people, seeming unrelated, in a weave of densely patterned prose, with a lightless cyclist in darkling near-collisions acting as the shuttle but only once as a catalyst. The characters are fully realized, their interior lives brought forward; you begin to care about them, fear for them, be anxious for their welfare. The climax approaches, you fear the worst, the tile-counter works his incantation against his visions, but the shock is not expected and relief evokes mixed emotions. You'll stay up late to finish this.

Sebastian Faulks' A Week In December follows an ensemble of characters through a single week. These characters are related most obviously through a dinner party planned for the end of the week. There is also a connection between many of them with a psychiatric hospital in London. The loose connections between characters means that the story hops around a bit as we follow each character through each day of the week. The chapters comprising the day of the week roughly follow the chronology of a day, though there are numerous flashbacks to break up the monotony of an adherence to strict temporal order.

Thematically, Faulks pulls together a number of interesting contemporary ideas: the rise of home-grown terrorism, the pursuit of money as an end in itself, the increasing complication of trading commodities, and the idea of truth and faith in the contemporary world. As such, he has set a bold agenda for himself. While he does a good job in explaining some of the arcana of the financial world, the other areas are less well developed. It is probably for this reason that throughout the book, the character of Veals seems like the (anti-) hero in which Faulks is most interested.

Ultimately, Faulks is unable to pull all the threads together. While a Dickensian conclusion where all the strands are neatly tied together would have seemed forced, the book is left as feeling like it never quite came together. I applaud Faulks for taking on the big subjects, but I wish he had managed it a bit better.

The title is a quote from Dr. Thomas Szasz, psychiatrist, from his book the Second Sin, 1973 and one of the prefaces in the book. This quote hooked me into the book.
Back to the book, a very sophisticated essay on the mental state of present society with each character almost perfectly playing a different permutation of the very real life everyday characters in modern society. The new sanity/insanity? An excellent read if one is willing to put out the energy to actually reflect on the part each character plays on the stage of life. I highly recommend!