Matt Prior is not the sharpest tool in the shed. A business reporter, he left his job at a daily paper just as newspaper jobs were becoming scarce enough to seem worth keeping. Worse, he quit in order to start a website devoted to reporting the financial news as poetry. Not exactly a sure thing. Meanwhile, his adorable wife, Lisa, went on a shopping binge, and the combination of those two factors led the Priors to borrow repeatedly against their house. The website, it probably goes without saying, failed, and the family is now getting by on Lisa's pay as a secretary, although "getting by" is an exaggeration: what Matt knows, and Lisa doesn't, is that they're a week away from losing the house. Matt has a plan, but his plan, incredibly, might be an even worse idea than starting a financial-poetry website.

Jess Walter excels at writing topical novels. His 2006 hit, The Zero, dealt with the aftermath of 9/11; Citizen Vince tackled witness protection and the significance of voting. Now he's written a story about the recession, a topic so fresh we're still in it. The Financial Lives of the Poets is a tougher sell—partly because a global economic downturn holds less drama than organized crime or a terrorist attack, but mostly because, this time around, Walter lacks a tough guy to hang the story on. Matt is kind of a screw-up. He knows he's a screw-up, but that doesn't mean it's any less frustrating to watch him keep making bad decisions. He's probably a more realistic character than the heroes of Citizen Vince and The Zero. Like many, he's been seduced and betrayed by the American dream, but he's still helplessly drawn toward it. Every time he catches the tiniest break, he starts doing Ponzi-scheme math to figure out how he can leverage that little bit into a lot. It never works.

Walter's consistently sardonic, smarty-pants narrative voice turns this bleak tale into an entertaining romp. He's a master of the vernacular: the "conversations" between Matt and the pot-smoking guys he meets at a 7-11 are spot on, if dishearteningly vapid. The plot gets very crowded and the realism grows thin in the book's second half, but Walter's message comes through loud and clear. As a reader, you hope things work out for Matt. But you can't help thinking it's against the odds.

Becky Ohlsen is a freelance writer in Portland, Oregon.

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A new novel by the Edgar Award-winning author of Citizen Vince is cause for celebration; though tedious passages of indulgent free verse threaten to derail an otherwise promising premise, Walter manages to pull it off with zippy dialog and a likable, if extremely flawed, main character. Matt Prior is a former journalist who bailed from his newspaper job to start a misconceived web site—poetfolio.com—featuring literary writing about the financial world. Now his web site is floundering, and he has no job prospects in sight. Convinced that his wife's furtive text messages signal an affair with a high school flame and desperate for cash to prevent his mortgage lender from foreclosing on their house, Matt stumbles into an unlikely money-making venture: drug dealer to the middle-aged. Fans of the TV series Weeds will not be disappointed. Manic, sleep-deprived, cringe-inducing hilarity ensues as Prior sinks lower and lower toward rock bottom before he finds a glimmer of redemption. VERDICT Prior is a zany, foul-mouthed Willy Loman in search of a stimulus package, and readers looking for some humor with their layoff notices will certainly relate.—Christine Perkins, Bellingham P.L., WA

National Book Award–finalist Walter does for the nation's bleak financial landscape what he did for 9/11 in The Zero: whip-smart satire with heart. Matt Prior quits his job as a business reporter to start Poetfolio.com, a Web site featuring poetry about finance, or "money-lit." Unsurprisingly, it tanks, and Matt returns to the newspaper, only to be laid off with a meager severance package. Now not only are the Priors in danger of losing their house, but Matt is convinced that his wife, Lisa, is having an affair with an old boyfriend she rediscovered during her lengthy nightly Facebook sessions. With two sons in overpriced Catholic school and his increasingly senile father to support, Matt's bank accounts dwindle amid his financial planner's dire predictions (diagnosis: "fiscal Ebola"). When an appealing but illegal moneymaking opportunity presents itself, Matt jumps at the chance. The decision to include snippets of Matt's poetry in the novel was a risky one, but Walter pulls it off, never resorting to pretension or overused metaphors for life's meltdowns. (Oct.)