3 out of 4 stars
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Cooperative Lives by Patrick Finegan follows two families living in New York between the years 2010 and 2013. It chronicles their lives and the lives of the people living in their upscale apartment building. As the story moves back and forth between earlier and later events we see how the country’s financial crisis places them all in a difficult position to maintain the lives that they had before. We see just how the subsequent loss of jobs and the government’s fight against terrorism impacts regular citizens.
The author mentioned many issues that were prominent only in America at that time. I think this is fair to note as it will impact the reader’s overall interest if they understand what the author is referring to. However, I did understand more about the situation in New York at that time. The financial crisis always seemed like this larger than life global downfall, but we often forget that real people were behind it and affected by it.
From the book, the decline seemed to affect people with assumed affluence more than anything. These were people who overspent but didn't actually have deep wells just a constant, large paycheck that when cut off left them scrambling to maintain their current lifestyle. For me, it made the novel mildly unsettling just because it painted a society where gain was the name of the game despite who had to pay for it, and someone’s death had more value than their life.
Living life literally becomes a burden to these characters. They struggle to keep up with appearances, and family relationships are strained because of it. Literally everyone in this story, especially the two main families, kept ignoring the cracks in their foundation to save face, so when tragedy finally hit them they fell apart. The author really painted that picture well.
This book got heavy with the investing, financial, trading and stock market jargon sometimes and definitely had many ‘soapbox’ moments. I wasn’t always sure where the author was going with a situation, but he had a lot to say about the world and the state it was in then and did so through his characters.
But honestly, all of this was not really a problem. The story itself was poignant and engaging most of the time. However, I would still give this book 3 out of 4 stars for over-explaining. Too many ‘backstory dumps' and I know it was a lot of information, but it was overwhelming to read at times. The plot had very little action so when the author suddenly broke off for three or four pages to fill in the backstory, sometimes within a backstory, it really slowed the book down.
The descriptions about everything, not just characters' lives, were just far too heavy with some sentences a paragraph long. And a lot of it didn’t actually affect the plot. The author also used different names for two of the characters without clearly establishing beforehand that this was another name for them. Not a nickname, a whole other name. It was a little annoying because I actually thought it was a typo at first or that they were referring to another person, until about the 10th chapter when it was finally explained. There were very few spelling and grammatical errors overall.
That being said, I do think this book is correctly labeled by the author as contemporary historical fiction. So if you like books that are littered with historical details about buildings and people, touching on NSA mandates and the insurance and financial worlds, you will appreciate the litany of descriptive details this book has to offer.
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Cooperative Lives
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