No doubt you’ve learn a very good quantity of books wherein you already know the protagonist is in hassle, although they kind of don’t. They could also be with the flawed individual, or within the flawed place, or working for the flawed folks within the flawed enterprise. Rafael Frumkin’s second novel, Confidence, isn’t just one of these books but in addition options all of the above.
When the novel opens, Ezra Green is in jail for being a flimflam man, however he’s nonetheless peddling the identical snake oil as he was on the skin. The solely distinction is that now he’s doing it for cigarettes and ramen noodles versus tens of millions, nay, billions of {dollars}.
Ezra, the son of working-class dad and mom, is larcenous from an early age. Small in stature, with horrible eyesight, teenage Ezra is shipped (on scholarship) to a boot camp often attended by wealthy unhealthy boys. There he meets and falls in love with good-looking, smooth-talking and utterly amoral Orson Ortman. He is the practice wreck you need to warn Ezra in opposition to, the miscreant who makes all of the crimson flags begin waving. It could also be a bit on the nostril, however Ezra’s blind spots aren’t restricted to his imaginative and prescient.
Once out of the camp, the boys shortly learn to separate wealthy and gullible folks, particularly girls, from their cash. They begin small and find yourself concocting the mom of all scams: NuLife, a faux non secular therapeutic firm that’s facilitated by the Bliss-Mini, a machine with brilliant lights that you just clamp in your head. How it really works is anybody’s guess, however it makes Ezra and Orson multimillionaires of their 20s and transforms Orson right into a cult chief. All the whereas, Ezra pines for him with pitiable desperation.
Author of The Comedown, Frumkin is great at dissecting all method of malfeasance and corruption. Ezra doesn’t blink when he has his assistants prepare dinner the books, default on loans (Deutsche Bank, anybody?), defraud clients and shareholders and slime those that threaten to out the corporate as a boondoggle. In one hilariously ghastly scene, a person whose thought was stolen by Orson exhibits up in NuLife’s boardroom, threatening to sue just like the Winklevoss twins however “dressed in the hoodie and jeans of the Zuckerbergian douchebag.” Even a navy coup in South America doesn’t hassle Ezra, so long as the bucks hold coming in and Orson is glad.
In a world the place well-heeled heels are arrested for cryptocurrency scams, squillionaires gleefully trash their very own self-importance initiatives and masters of the universe shame themselves time and again, Confidence’s arrival is past well timed.
Discussion about this post