Extravagance
A Novel
-
-
5.0 • 2 Ratings
-
-
- $5.99
-
- $5.99
Publisher Description
William Tobias Merrick, an energetic young man from the provinces, travels to the big city in a time of great optimism and ferment, hoping to make his mark on a frenzied, money-crazed society obsessed with the promise of new technologies.
The city in question is London in the 1690s; but it is also New York in the 1990s. The new technologies are diving bells, pneumatic winches, and "sucking-worm" drainage engines; but they are also wireless telecommunication devices, patented biotechnology processes, and revolutionary electronic Internet routers. Only the sense of unlimited possibility remains the same throughout.
Unfolding simultaneously in two distant--but remarkably similar--periods of history, Extravagance is a comic, pictaresque novel of financial mania, the story of a world gripped by a terminal case of irrational exuberance. Navigating the perils of both eras is a single cast of characters: Will himself, a young man on the make, eager to do whatever it takes to make his fortune; Will's uncle (and sponsor) Gilbert Hawking, a shrewd businessman with one foot in the Old Economy and one in the New; Benjamin Fletcher, the developer of a pioneering new technology destined to set the world on fire; and Theodore Witherspoon, the cheerfully unscrupulous wizard of the financial markets who promises to make them all wealthy beyond their dreams.
Meanwhile, Will's aspirations are complicated by his pursuit of Ben Fletcher's sister, Eliza, the gorgeous and disconcertingly aggressive woman who is as desirable as she is elusive. Can Will succeed in his efforts to win both Eliza and the fortune that her brother's new technology seems likely to bring him? And can he make it all happen before the general euphoria of the age reaches its inevitable climax?
Extravagance is a uniquely conceived work of high comic entertainment -- an ultra-smart time machine of a novel that proves that both love and greed are timeless.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Krist (Chaos Theory; Bad Chemistry) uses the analogous market excesses of the 1690s and the 1990s as dual, parallel settings for a young man's journey up the business ladder as he tries to make his fortune through the stock market. The protagonist of this syncopated narrative is Will Merrick, a precocious young man who moves to the city to try to fulfill his rags-to-riches dreams: in 17th-century London he is a "stock jobber" whose task is to try to capitalize on such new technologies as winches and drainage engines, and on Wall Street during the frenetic dot-com days of the late 1990s he is a financial spy in a high-stakes IPO deal. While he makes his way through the two labyrinthine monetary worlds, a romantic subplot finds Merrick wooing (in both timelines) the rich, strong-willed and mischievous Eliza Fletcher, who leads him through a series of on-again, off-again dates and interludes that cause Merrick to question his identity as a clever rich guy on the make. Krist pulls off an impressive feat with his careful plotting as Merrick bounces back and forth between eras, opportunities and moral quandaries; unfortunately, the London in the 1690s part of the narrative fades as the book progresses, and the love affair is competent but rarely compelling. Nonetheless, Krist's ambition is laudable, and the novel is a worthwhile read, especially when he gets his complex narrative to click on all cylinders. 3-city author tour.
