Confidence by Rafael Frumkin

February 13, 2023

Confidence by Rafael Frumkin

Ezra and Orson are best friends and sometime lovers, both growing up poor, who meet as baby criminals at Last Chance Camp, one stop before juvie. Ezra has his first experience with con games when he's ten, and he and his mother stop at a tent revival meeting, and his mother cons the church goers. He and Orson run their first scam together on a site like Etsy, then get into a bigger con game involving Bitcoin, because most people don't actually understand what it is or how to use it. Their target market is the ultra-rich, "the man," the blood suits (as Orson and Ezra call them), the kind of people who are so rich they have no idea what real life is like and don't bother to closely research the schemes of con men like Orson and Ezra. They are also the kind of people that the rest of us secretly enjoy watching get swindled because they deserve it and they can afford it. What does it matter if they get taken for a little money? But then the boys come up with an idea for a much bigger scam, a (phony) behavior altering device/program that takes off when they market it to the wives of ultra-rich men. They find themselves riding a billion dollar wave until it comes crashing down. Who needs the American Dream, these guys have the American Con.

Pyramid or Ponzi schemes have been around for a long time, as have con artists. Famous con artists include P. T. Barnum, L. Ron Hubbard, and Donald Trump, and Ezra and Orson aspire to join their ranks. The key to a successful con is offering something that is too good to be true, and making it a little obscure so that people don't understand exactly what they are buying. Orson and Ezra are opposites: Ezra is short, nerdy, brilliant, introverted and addicted to the internet; Orson is movie star handsome, charismatic, charming, and a born salesman. Ezra literally has tunnel vision, suffering from glaucoma and progressively poor eyesight, and he has a hard time seeing Orson for who he really is. Greed is always their driving force, but their real problems begin when Orson starts believing the BS that they are selling. 

Mel Brooks made a movie called The Producers, about a Broadway producer who concocts a scheme to produce the worst play ever written and make a killing by over-selling shares to investors (The Twelve Chairs is another Brooks film about con artists). 

Many thanks to Edelweiss and the publisher for providing an eARC for review.

The Producers

The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel

February 23, 2020

The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel

Located on a remote bay on Vancouver Island, the luxury Hotel Caiette caters to a wealthy clientele in search of a reprieve from their daily lives in the corporate world.  Super-rich financier Jonathan Alkaitis owns the hotel but his wealth is built on a house of cards:  his investment firm is actually a giant Ponzi scheme that he has been running for decades.

I wasn’t initially interested in reading a book about a Ponzi scheme, but I like the author’s previous book Station Eleven so much that I decided to give her new book a try.  The Glass Hotel is similar in structure to the previous book in that there is a definite “before” and “after” related to a specific event, and the story line wraps around itself, moving from character to character and backward and forward in time.  It is also set in the same world and time as Station Eleven since events from that book are referenced here and at least two of the characters recur.  As in Station Eleven, the beginning is also the ending.

While the basic plot is about the Ponzi scheme and all of the people affected by it, there are a number of sub-plots and the characters are fascinating.  The overall story is hard to summarize since part of the appeal is finding out how the characters connect to each other and what happens to them (it reminded me of the television show Lost in that regard).  Several characters are chameleon-like, reinventing themselves and their lives as needed, if not in reality, then in an alternate universe.

Fraud and facades play a role, not only with the money fund but with relationships and creativity – at one point, Vincent’s brother steals a number of videos that she made and passes them off as his own work (Vincent is female).  Characters often express regret and wonder “what if” and “if I had only,” and imagine a counterlife where they acted differently than they actually did, although their versions of themselves in that parallel universe are not necessarily better people.

I found this to be very enjoyable and recommend it to anyone who reads literary fiction.

Many thanks to Edelweiss and the publisher for providing an e-ARC in return for a review.