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Present Value: A Novel Hardcover – September 2, 2003

by Sabin Willett (Author)

19 customer reviews

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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

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Product details

Hardcover: 416 pages
Publisher: Villard (September 2, 2003)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1400060869
ISBN-13: 978-1400060863
Product Dimensions: 6.4 x 1.2 x 9.6 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 19 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,633,591 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #8987 in Books > Literature & Fiction > United States > Humor
- #35202 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Humor & Satire > Humorous

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S. Vorenberg

Who is the real parent?

April 27, 2016

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

This was my first Sabin Willett novel, found from a recommendation after finishing another from a novelist I like. Wow! This is both an entertaining and a deeply moving novel about responsibility. When I first started reading it, I was enjoying the snarky tone of the writing but didn't think it was going much of anywhere. It developed in unexpected ways, and I was in tears at the end. I don't want to spoil the ending for you. Well worth a read. This was one of the best I've read in the last year or two.

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Intrigued by comparisons to Thomas Wolfe...

September 23, 2003

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

I grabbed and gobbled Sabin Willet's newest, "Present Value". Wolfe's "Bonfire of the Vanities" is the testament to high-priced American greed gone bad (please, please don't see the movie!). Willett starts out on a very promising note. He's witty and sharp, and he sets his parable to Enron's story in a well-grounded toy distribution company. How the company has positioned itself for disaster by catering to all the current American corporate fads (an attorney that shadows the CEO at all times, so that everything said is privileged, the "off the books" subsidiaries, all venture capital deals, the need to find some third quarter revenue SOMEWHERE so that everyone's stock options won't be disturbed, etc.)is at the core of this corporate fairy tale gone bad.
In chapter one, Willett's sarcastic wit shines through as he describes the ritual of his hero, Fritz Brubaker, dropping off the children (Precious Cargo) at their exclusive private school. His treatise on the massive, fully-equipped line of SUV's is exceeded only by him revealing the brattiness of his spoiled offspring. We move on with nice-guy Fritz opening up his eyes (finally) to the difficulties in his marriage, where his wife Linda is more fond of her Blackberry device than she is of him, and the ethics of the company he works for are seriously in question.
The Brubaker family is headed for a fall, and in a thinly disguised plot twist, the weight of the white collar crime that brings them to their knees all falls on Fritz. As Fritz makes a couple of legendary appearances in court, the story recaps how he got to this place, including his entanglement with a wife that resembles a shark more than a feminine ideal. Through
it all, Willett's skill at making you care about Fritz, and the lightning quick speed with which his life falls apart, keeps you reading without pause.
The story starts to turn south with the introduction of Ronnie, a private investigator. Ronnie doesn't fit into the story, and the subplot between her and Fritz adds a jarring note. Despite this, Willett winds to the end of Fritz's incarceration, keeping things light, and letting the reader wonder whether the Brubakers will ever be able to set things right again.
A fine read, a light touch, but no Thomas Wolfe here. Just a clever novel that feeds our fascination with the ethical malaise in American corporations.

7 people found this helpful

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funny and courageous

May 27, 2005

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

The opening scene in this book is deliciously funny; beware if you've ever lost your temper at your kid or had to wait in a car-queue at school or the day-care center. And there is plenty of wit elsewhere too in this wonderful satire of the blackberry set. Worth taking some time off from your email to read! But Willett is not afraid to be sentimental either, which is why some readers may be disappointed by the ending. I wasn't. This is a funny book, but it has a secret at its center: a heart. In the end it is about making up not breaking up, and I respect it for that. Also, unputdownable.

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Deadlaw

Decent Wolfe imitation

April 12, 2005

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

Tom Wolfe can't end a book either, but he makes up for it by giving us complex characters drawn from painstaking research. Willett catches the rhythms of Wolfe's dialogue, but never creates anything meaningful, or even comprehensible, out of it. The first half of the book is riveting [if you can forgive being jolted out of it by his factual and research errors -- if you are going to mock SUV's by engine size, don't create a Yukon with a 2500 CC engine] but the second half of the book falls apart as the characters don't develop. He then relies on unlikely coincidences and far-fetched occurences to move the plot to a hectic conclusion. Could have been a decent book.

3 people found this helpful

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Maureen Bigham

Value ? What is real value worth?

August 17, 2015

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

Willet is very wordy in many chapters. The Washington DC episode could have been left out altogether. I did love the chapters from the lecture hall. Willet does try to allow his readers to learn , to think, and evaluate. I liked that . It is his third book I have read .

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Eileen G

The book was a bit tiresome to read but it still had an interesting message.

January 9, 2013

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

Overall, the group I'm in liked the book and thought the author did a fine job of presenting his characters as well as the story line. The story resulted in a lively discussion of how this book reflects some current behaviors.

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Kindle Customer

dated novel

March 7, 2013

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

this novel was not very well written. The constant references to the "new" blackberry technology was extremely annoying. I was glad when it was over ( it was the selection of the month for my book club otherwise I would not have read it all the way through).

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bookworm

What a Present

March 25, 2009

Format: Paperback

I liked everything about this story, except maybe the cheating wife, but I guess that's a stereotype in today's culture. I even liked the ending. I would have hated to see Fritz wander about in a lonely life after all he had been through. I think little Ronnie knew just what she was doing when she lead him right to the Waldorf-Astoria and into a room she "borrowed" seemingly at random, ya think? The fact that they all ended up in the elevator at the same time had to be a coincidence, but I think it opened a few eyes to just what they had become.
The scenes as they were portrayed just re-inforces what most of us realize anyway, especially how people flock to events and then spread what they saw as fact and none of the facts were actually facts, just good old gossip. Makes one wonder how it all started in the first place.
This was my first book by this author, but won't be the last. Since I have not read any by Tom Wolfe, this did not suffer in comparison. This also was a detour from my usual choices,i.e. murder, suspense, crime solving.

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