Angelica Baker's Our Little Racket is a massively ambitious debut novel about the fallout from massive ambition coupled with unbridled greed. Her tale of the human wages of capitalism run amok explores how the malfeasance and meltdown of an investment bank that was one of the pillars of the financial industrythink Lehman Brothers in 2008affects its longtime CEO and his family. To chart the damage, Baker spreads her narrative's wealth between five women in Greenwich, Connecticut: the CEO's coolly elegant wife and feisty teenage daughter, their two purported best friends, and the family's Ivy League–educated nanny. Our Little Racket takes its title from Anne Carson's "Little Racket": "I can hear from their little racket, the birds are burning up and down like holy fools . . . don't keep saying you don't hear it too." But its concernswith old money versus new, the powerlessness and helplessness of women whose positions rise and fall with their husbands' net worth, and the moral implications of extreme wealthcome from Edith Wharton. In lieu of New York society, Baker takes aim at Greenwich's elite (though not the Russian billionaires who have taken up residence more recently). Among the targets most squarely in her sights are the over-groomed, over-educated, under-occupied women who have outsourced the care of their children and obscenely opulent gated estates to hired help. She has a bead on the telling details, from iced tea garnished with sprigs of basil to a private, in-home shopping party that spares these trophy wives the awkwardness of having to seek their latest luxury fix of jewel-toned stilettos and bead-encrusted gowns in public so soon after the financial collapses that devastated so many investors. This scathing description, from the nanny's point of view, of the scene along Greenwich Avenue captures Baker's tone:
It was a mommy playground, and by midafternoon all the frustrated energies of these underutilized women had them trolling this street in droves. They prowled the boutiques and the juice bars, quaking with everything they had but could not use. The Ivy League educations they'd been allowed to pursue, matriculating when they did, in the wake of feminism's second wave. The endless pluckings and bleachings and injectings that left them in a perpetual state of both tranquility (no wrinkles) and surprise (unnatural eyebrow arches) but also seemed to extract their sexuality from them as if by syringe. She'd never seen so many beautiful women who seemed to live life at such a distant remove from their own sexiness. The question is, how much time do you want to spend in this company? The bulk of the noveland it is bulkyfocuses on the "shell-shocked year" after Bob "Silverback" D'Amico's investment bank, Weiss & Partners, sinks into bankruptcy amid swirling suggestions of possible criminal wrongdoing, including shady accounting tricks. While Bob, largely a cipher, stays holed up in their New York apartment, his classy wife, old-moneyed Isabel Berkeley, retreats to her Greenwich bedroom in shock. Isabel gets through the first weeks on Xanax supplied by her friend Minathe classic outsider straining for admissionbefore she uncoils into action. Meanwhile Lily, the D'Amicos' overqualified nanny, keeps the household running, though we never fully understand why she would embed herself with these people and endure their condescension for nearly ten years, with no plan to write a Nanny Diaries sort of exposé, no matter how much they're paying her. Her function in Our Little Racket is the critical observer, and above all she's outraged that neither parent thinks to comfort their eight-year-old twin "robber barons" in training or their fifteen-year-old daughter, Madison, a sophomore at Greenwich Prep, in the midst of this upheaval. Poor Madison, acting on scant information from her AWOL parents and unable to conceive of her hard-driving, hard-drinking father knowingly committing any wrongdoing, must navigate the brutal gossip and cold shoulders at school, but she's no pushover: "Madison was her father's coarse energy poured over ice," Lily notes. "She was her mother's goddess features, infused with her father's ceaseless certainty that he was right." As if things weren't bad enough, Madison's best friend's father, a Yale economics professor, considers it his moral imperative to vent his outrage at her father and his ilk in his Paul Krugman–esque columns for The New York Times, despite his daughter's pleas for tact. The first of his many diatribes on the subject includes these lines: "Weiss is now the Roach Motelits investors checked in, but they can't check out . . . And what of D'Amico himself, the King of the Cockroaches? Did he scramble his way out of that car before it went over that cliff? Or will he have to answer, in court, for his crimes?" Madison, at once unbelievably savvy and credibly vulnerable, takes her father's "implosion" the hardest, and her story dominates the book. It is the most fully realizedin fact, her perspective alone could easily have carried this novelbut also, in the early chapters, the most tiresome. Pages upon painful pages unfold in school hallways, locker rooms, playing fields, and at the unchaperoned parties where Madison's unbearably catty, snooty peers trade slights, barbs, precious intel, illicit cocktails, drugs, and sexual favors to elevate their status, making us feel at times as if we've wandered into a "Fast Times at Greenwich Prep" sort of story. But the novellike many businessespicks up in its fourth quarter, when the whole situation comes to a head at a local gala and Baker finally generates a modicum of sympathy for these spoiled characters. She captures their very real misery while stressing the repercussions of a heedless "willingness to gamble away" the most important things in lifeincluding family and empathy. Years later, Madison reflects sagely, "No one, it turned out, ever told the truth about this kind of pain. It wasn't a crucible; it didn't always make you new." Our Little Racket, while it takes too long to get there, ends in just the right place and on just the right note. The bottom line: Angelica Baker is a writer to watch out for. Heller McAlpin is a New York–based critic who reviews books for NPR.org, The Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Christian Science Monitor, and other publications. Reviewer: Heller McAlpin
The Barnes & Noble Review
04/03/2017 Baker’s ambitious debut focuses on 15-year-old Madison D’Amico and her family during the “shell-shocked” year her father’s investment bank plummets from financial giant to bankruptcy amid rumors of criminal wrongdoing. When his business starts to implode, Brooklyn-born CEO Bob “Silverback” D’Amico relocates to his luxury Manhattan apartment, while back in Greenwich, Conn., his wife, Isabel—previously envied for her elegant taste and old money—tries to remain aloof from a rising tide of gossip and hostility. Isabel’s friend Mina offers comfort with Xanax, and then finds herself among the gossips. Meanwhile, at Greenwich Prep, Bob and Isabel’s daughter, Madison, chooses the company of boyfriend Chip and trouble-seeking Zoe over former BFF Amanda, whose father persists in writing newspaper columns excoriating Madison’s. Alert and sympathetic to Madison’s precarious situation, the D’Amicos’ nanny, Lily, tries to help her charge, but discovers loyalty has its challenges as well as limits. Baker switches perspective among five women (Isabel, Lily, Mina, Madison, Amanda) to create a collage of Greenwich parents, children, and the people paid to manage the parents’ houses and care for their kids. For the Greenwich contingent, there are outsiders and insiders, official and unofficial stories, all teeming with betrayals large and small, accidental and intentional. Baker examines different facets of these betrayals from multiple points of view. As the teenager puzzles out her father’s actions and her mother’s silences, a personal, thought-provoking portrait emerges of the American Dream, complete with a web of visible and invisible cracks in the foundation. (June)
“I read all 512 pages of Angelica Baker’s debut novel greedily, in one dizzying weekend, unable to put it down...The book gets beyond moneymaking hubris to a more basic kind of desire-the fretful, shapeless longing of those who are sidelined to be seen somehow as indispensable.” — The Atlantic
“Baker skillfully grapples with questions of complicity...the novel is never less than gripping, and even if this is a world seemingly unfamiliar to you, it’s impossible not to be swept up in the hard universal truths uncovered within its pages.” — Nylon Magazine
“A classic page-turner...As the story unfolds, the author takes us deep into Gold Coast life in 2008, just as the financial collapse was about to wreak havoc on the American economy... Elegant writing and razor-sharp analysis of upper-class suburbia.” — Connecticut Post
“Our Little Racket is a smart debut novel that examines power, greed, and the price of the American dream.” — PopSugar, “ Best Books for Summer 2017”
“Although the novel is set in the banking crisis of 2008, it feels as current as today’s congressional testimony... Ambitious... The atmosphere in this novel is stretched taut as the characters wait for the other polished loafer to drop.” — Kansas City Star
“Wry and perceptive.” — The National Book Review
“Working in the vein of Wharton, Cheever and Yates, but with a voice and vision wholly her own, Angelica Baker has crafted a timely and powerful exploration of greed and hubris...Clear and commanding prose... Baker is wildly talented and this debut is her gorgeous opening note.” — Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney, bestselling author of The Nest
“Our Little Racket is a golden web of a story hanging in the rubble of a house built by deceit and greed. A magnificent debut.” — Ramona Ausubel, author of Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty and No One is Here Except All of Us
“Angelica Baker has written a terrific, whip-smart debut. Our Little Racket is a humane and serious window onto the troubling social world of the bankers who wrecked our economy. This is a great first novel.” — Stuart Nadler, author of The Inseparables
“A wonderfully rich debut from an incisive and elegant writer. Baker’s women are worlds unto themselves, each with her own center of gravity, and it is a total pleasure to be held captive by them.” — Julia Pierpont, author of Among the Ten Thousand Things
“Our Little Racket is a gratifying peek over the hedgerows of Greenwich, laden with delicious anthropological detail. But like a modern day Henry James, Angelica Baker uses the lives of the one percent to explore themes-of love and loyalty, family and friendship-that matter to all of us.” — Rumaan Alam, author of Rich and Pretty
“Blending high-stakes economic intrigue with high-class family drama, Our Little Racket is a sweeping and immersive novel. Baker fully inhabits each of her characters, voicing each with depth and breadth...[An] engrossing and illuminating glimpse into Greenwich’s upper crust.” — Booklist
“A personal, thought-provoking portrait emerges of the American Dream, complete with a web of visible and invisible cracks in the foundation.” — Publishers Weekly
Our Little Racket is a golden web of a story hanging in the rubble of a house built by deceit and greed. A magnificent debut.
“Our Little Racket is a smart debut novel that examines power, greed, and the price of the American dream.
“Best Books for Summer 2017” PopSugar
Working in the vein of Wharton, Cheever and Yates, but with a voice and vision wholly her own, Angelica Baker has crafted a timely and powerful exploration of greed and hubris...Clear and commanding prose... Baker is wildly talented and this debut is her gorgeous opening note.
“I read all 512 pages of Angelica Baker’s debut novel greedily, in one dizzying weekend, unable to put it down...The book gets beyond moneymaking hubris to a more basic kind of desire-the fretful, shapeless longing of those who are sidelined to be seen somehow as indispensable.
Wry and perceptive.
Angelica Baker has written a terrific, whip-smart debut. Our Little Racket is a humane and serious window onto the troubling social world of the bankers who wrecked our economy. This is a great first novel.
A wonderfully rich debut from an incisive and elegant writer. Baker’s women are worlds unto themselves, each with her own center of gravity, and it is a total pleasure to be held captive by them.
A classic page-turner...As the story unfolds, the author takes us deep into Gold Coast life in 2008, just as the financial collapse was about to wreak havoc on the American economy... Elegant writing and razor-sharp analysis of upper-class suburbia.
Baker skillfully grapples with questions of complicity...the novel is never less than gripping, and even if this is a world seemingly unfamiliar to you, it’s impossible not to be swept up in the hard universal truths uncovered within its pages.
Although the novel is set in the banking crisis of 2008, it feels as current as today’s congressional testimony... Ambitious... The atmosphere in this novel is stretched taut as the characters wait for the other polished loafer to drop.
Our Little Racket is a gratifying peek over the hedgerows of Greenwich, laden with delicious anthropological detail. But like a modern day Henry James, Angelica Baker uses the lives of the one percent to explore themes-of love and loyalty, family and friendship-that matter to all of us.
Blending high-stakes economic intrigue with high-class family drama, Our Little Racket is a sweeping and immersive novel. Baker fully inhabits each of her characters, voicing each with depth and breadth...[An] engrossing and illuminating glimpse into Greenwich’s upper crust.
Blending high-stakes economic intrigue with high-class family drama, Our Little Racket is a sweeping and immersive novel. Baker fully inhabits each of her characters, voicing each with depth and breadth...[An] engrossing and illuminating glimpse into Greenwich’s upper crust.
Although the novel is set in the banking crisis of 2008, it feels as current as today’s congressional testimony... Ambitious... The atmosphere in this novel is stretched taut as the characters wait for the other polished loafer to drop.