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WORK TITLE: Our Little Racket
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.angelicagracebaker.com/
CITY: Brooklyn
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://www.angelicagracebaker.com/about/ * https://bookpage.com/reviews/21509-angelica-baker-our-little-racket#.WdAsu2hSxPY * https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2017/06/our-little-racket-angelica-baker.html
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born in Los Angeles, CA.
EDUCATION:Yale University, B.A.; Columbia University, M.F.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, novelist, and educator. Has taught at Columbia University, New York, NY, and Manhattanville College, Purchase, NY. Previously taught English to first graders in Paris, France.
AWARDS:Elmore A. Willets Prize for Fiction.
WRITINGS
Contributor of essays, reviews, and short stories to periodicals and websites, including Columbia, One Teen Story, Open Bar, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Rumpus.
SIDELIGHTS
Born and raised in Los Angeles, California, Angelica Baker is a writer and novelist who contributes essays, reviews, and short stories to periodicals and websites. In her debut novel, Our Little Racket, Baker writes about the fallout of the 2008 financial crisis with a focus on women living in affluent Greenwich, Connecticut, and a husband who played a primary role in the crisis. Baker came up with the idea for her novel while considering the narrative that developed concerning the men who brought about the financial crisis. Baker, however, became more interested in the men’s families and how they were affected by the fallout. In a Paste website interview with Bridey Heing, Baker remarked: “As I started reading about the people involved, I thought, ‘What would it be like to be in that family, waiting for everyone to tell you what it meant about you?’”
The women in Greenwich live in an insular community inhabited by the extremely wealthy. The novel revolves around the role that Bob “Silverback” D’Amicao played in the crisis. He is the CEO of a fictional investment bank that is likely to collapse and come under investigation by the federal authorities. As the crisis and Bob’s role gains traction in the news media, his wife, Isabel, and his daughter, Madison, along with the children’s nanny, Lily, start to worry about the many rumors concerning Bob and the family. They try to hide away from prying media and neighbors while Isabel turns to her friend Mina for support. However, Mina comes to think that perhaps her friend is only using her. As for Lily, she has given up eight years of her life and her own career ambitions to serve the D’Amico family, a job with numerous perks. Now she finds herself trying to help Madison but is soon facing a limit to how far her loyalty to the family will take her.
Meanwhile, Madison’s friend Amanda has a journalist father who is writing numerous newspaper columns that heap scorn not only on Bob and his role in the crisis but also on the entire D’Amico family. As a result, Madison distances herself from Amanda and ends up spending more and more time with her boyfriend, Chip. She also becomes friendly with Zoe, who seems intent on finding trouble. Throughout, Amanda often takes center stage in the story as she “puzzles out her father’s actions and her mother’s silences,” as a Publishers Weekly contributor noted.
As she explores the women’s reactions to the crisis, Baker delves into their growing realization that, in some ways, they may have been culpable for Bob’s role in the crisis. “Baker likens her novel’s structure to a Greek chorus, with women who observe and respond to the narrative’s action but do not directly influence it,” noted Heing in Paste. When she began the novel, Baker did not intend to focus on the women’s reactions. But as she told Heing being for the Paste website article, with each character she added to the story, she began to realize that she “had no interest in Bob’s perspective.”
Throughout the crisis, there is a growing demand for justice by the public, which seems likely to destroy Bob’s career and his family’s standing in the community. Bob has been secluding himself in his luxurious Manhattan apartment while the family has stayed in Greenwich. Eventually, however, Bob returns home and tells the real story of what happened to his teenage daughter.
“Madison is the real protagonist of the novel, a born insider who is starting to see through a lot of the people she interacts with, including her own mother,” wrote Connecticut Post website contributor Joe Meyers, who also noted the novel’s “combination of elegant writing and razor-sharp analysis of upper-class suburbia.” Stephanie Turza, writing in Booklist, remarked: “Blending high-stakes economic intrigue with high-class family drama, Our Little Racket is a sweeping and immersive novel.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, April 15, 2017, Stephanie Turza, review of Our Little Racket, p. 20.
Kirkus Reviews, February 15, 2017, review of Our Little Racket.
Publishers Weekly, April 3, 2017, review of Our Little Racket, p. 46.
Xpress Reviews, June 23, 2017, Laurie Cavanaugh, review of Our Little Racket.
ONLINE
Angelica Grace Baker Website, http://www.angelicagracebaker.com (January 9, 2017).
Connecticut Post Online, http://www.ctpost.com/ (June 23, 2017), Joe Meyers, review of Our Little Racket
Los Angeles Review of Books, https://lareviewofbooks.org/ (January 9, 2017), brief author profile.
Paste, https://www.pastemagazine.com/ (June 21, 2017), Bridey Heing, “Angelica Baker Talks Our Little Racket and Offers an Intimate Look at the Great Recession’s Villains.”
Writer’s Digest Online, http://www.writersdigest.com/ (July 5, 2017), Cris Freese, “7 Things I’ve Learned So Far, by Angelica Baker.”
Angelica Baker is pursuing an MFA in Fiction at Columbia University. Her writing has appeared in The Rumpus, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, and Tin House's"The Open Bar." She was raised in Los Angeles and now lives in Brooklyn.
Angelica Baker was born and raised in Los Angeles. She received her B.A. from Yale University and her M.F.A. from Columbia University. She now lives in Brooklyn.
My debut novel, OUR LITTLE RACKET, will be published by Ecco on June 20, 2017. The novel tracks the fallout of the 2008 Wall Street financial crisis among the women of an affluent, insular community in Greenwich, Connecticut. As these women and others struggle to understand their altered roles within their community, they are also forced to confront the dishonesty and self-preservation that have always existed beneath the surface of the world they’ve created for their children – their own social pyramid scheme, of sorts, with its troubling echoes of the world their husbands inhabit.
I've also written essays and reviews for The Los Angeles Review of Books, Columbia: A Journal of Literature & Art, The Rumpus, and Tin House's "The Open Bar." My fiction has appeared in Violet and One Teen Story. I hold an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University, where I taught undergraduate creative writing, and I currently teach at Manhattanville College.
Before that, I lived in Paris for a year, where I taught English to French first graders. I received my BA in English and Creative Writing from Yale University, where I worked with Caryl Phillips and Amy Bloom. At Yale, I was awarded the Elmore A. Willets Prize for Fiction and was nominated for the Steere Prize in Women's Studies for the Senior Essay for my thesis on the novels of Joan Didion.
I was born and raised in Los Angeles, and now I live in Brooklyn.
7 Things I’ve Learned So Far, by Angelica Baker
By: Cris Freese | July 5, 2017
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“7 Things I’ve Learned So Far” (this installment written by Angelica Baker, author of OUR LITTLE RACKET) is a recurring column where writers at any stage of their career can talk about writing advice and instruction, as well as how they possibly got their literary agent—by sharing seven things they’ve learned along their writing journey that they wish they knew at the beginning.
Angelica Baker’s debut novel, OUR LITTLE RACKET, was published by Ecco in June 2017. She has written essays and reviews for The Los Angeles Review of Books, Columbia: A Journal of Literature & Art, The Rumpus, and Tin House’s “The Open Bar.” Her fiction has appeared in Violet and One Teen Story. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University. She currently teaches at Manhattanville College.
1. You should write every single day that you can…
During the year or so before I started writing my book, I solicited writing advice from every possible source. I was preparing for graduate school, starting to imagine what my writing life was going to look like once I’d been untethered from the “normal” confines of an office job, and I greedily sought out any potentially useful nugget of wisdom from every single writer I’d ever admired.
I’m sure I’ve forgotten (or at least flagrantly ignored) many of those maxims, but the one I find myself revisiting on an almost daily basis is this: it’s essential that you write every day because there’s no way to know, in advance, when inspiration is going to strike. Fruitful writing days, for me, often start out feeling almost exactly like useless writing days. If I’m not at my desk when a knotty problem works its way loose in my head, then there’s no chance that solution will ever make it onto the page.
2. …although if you don’t write every day, that’s fine!…
When I say that you should write every single day that you can, I mean that you should build up a habit, establish a routine, and make it feel as much like work—the kind of work where you have a boss who keeps you motivated and honest—as possible. But the unvarnished truth is that you won’t be able to write every day. Aside from days that were set aside for practical concerns, like making the money to pay my rent, there were many days during the four years I worked on my novel that were duds. Sometimes you fiddle with an open Word document for a few minutes before it becomes clear that your mind is sludge that particular day; sometimes, hopefully, you have an hour or so of productive note-taking or editing before you hit a wall. But always, always, there are days when nothing gets done, despite your best and most frantic intentions. And when you have a run of several days like that, despair can creep in. It begins to feel like you’re a delusional fraud, like you’ve let your brain go so soft that it will be impossible ever to whip it back into shape. That self-loathing begins to spiral, feeding on itself with every passing minute of non-writing.
I lost almost an entire year to a severe spiral like that; for months, it felt like I’d made zero progress on my novel. And then I gave some pages to a reader, and when we met for coffee to discuss them, she looked at me with sympathy and a little confusion as I described how useless these months of my life had been. But you are getting something done, she told me. These are obviously moving in the right direction. Why are you being so hard on yourself?
It’s hard to know when “taking the day off” from writing is self-indulgence and when it’s a smart way to avoid one of those spirals. But I’ve learned that I’m never going to be someone who writes every day, starting at nine o’clock on the dot and clocking out at five. My friend was right, when she intuited that I was inwardly berating myself and, as a result, stunting my own progress even further. She was right that I needed to be nicer to myself.
3. …but you should absolutely read every day.
And what’s the one thing that has, all my life, always made me feel better? Reading a book. So while I’ve learned that I’m not the kind of writer who can write every single day, I would be willing to bet that there hasn’t been a single day of my life when I’m not reading the fruits of someone else’s more successful labors. Ironically, reading a book I love almost never makes me feel jealous or petty, not even on my worst writing day. It reminds me of what it felt like to read when I was small, when the question of whether I’d finish writing a book was far less important to me than the question of which book I’d pick up next.
4. Be smart about who gets to read your writing and when you show it to them.
One of my biggest motivations in choosing to attend a graduate writing program was a desire to find a group of readers. My classmates are still doing this for me years later; whether it’s a quick read of a specific passage of my novel that was a struggle, or a deeper opinion on a draft of an essay that doesn’t really seem to be about anything yet, I rely on them on a regular basis (and return the favor whenever I’m asked).
But I knew them well by the time I trusted them to read my novel, and I learned the hard way that giving your work to someone you don’t yet have reason to trust can be a huge mistake. Negative criticism from a trusted reader can be useful because you know you can’t entirely discount his or her opinion. Negative criticism from someone whose tastes and critical eye are more mysterious to you doesn’t necessarily mean much; that person might be someone who would never, ever choose to pick up a book like yours in a bookstore. But here’s the catch: that doesn’t mean they can’t still hurt your feelings or make you doubt yourself. I’ve learned that I’m not yet tough enough—although I’m working on it!—to completely shrug off a nasty or ill-informed comment from anyone, even a reader I don’t necessarily respect. I’ve learned to protect myself, and more importantly my work, by choosing readers carefully.
5. Treat it like a job, even if people around you don’t.
Friends of mine who work in more linear fields have a hard time picturing exactly what it is I do during a day spent “writing.” This seems totally reasonable to me. It’s hard to explain to them exactly how the hours get filled, and I’d be humiliated if they could actually see my endless bouts of crying, pacing, flopping onto my bed in despair, and—yes—cruising through Twitter. But I’ve learned that this fuzziness from other people about what I do makes it all the more essential that I block off my writing time, treating it as something that cannot be interrupted. For years, I’ve worked multiple jobs to make my writing life possible, so there’s always going to be some juggling of schedules. But I try to establish my other commitments in advance and treat the time I plan to spend writing at home as somewhat inviolable. It’s not a free morning or afternoon that I’ll spend writing since I have nothing more pressing to do; it’s work, and I have to show up. There’s no one who would care if I didn’t.
6. Always start with something small.
It’s very rare that I sit down and dive directly into whatever project I hope to spend the day with. Generally, I begin with some sort of small writing or editing exercise that feels like it’s somewhere between “task” and “inspiration.” Sometimes, this can be a small thing I want to read instead, especially poetry. Whatever it is, it opens up the part of my brain that knows that it’s time to settle down, stop flitting from one Twitter link to the next, and work.
7. Don’t read the reviews!
It’s a bit of a cheat to include this on a list of things I’ve learned. It would be much more accurate to put it on a list of things I aspire to learn some time soon. I had a professor who told us once that she hadn’t read any reviews of her work since a particularly savage one for her second novel devastated her; she knew that there was no point. This makes logical sense to me. I understand completely that reading someone’s capsule review on Goodreads, in which my book is criticized because some of the characters in its pages aren’t good parents (according to the reviewer), is an activity that’s at best futile and at worst damaging. And yet, I’ve been reading reviews of my novel. I’ll probably keep reading them for now, much to my boyfriend’s dismay. But I hope, I really do hope, that I’m learning to ignore them.
Angelica Baker Talks Our Little Racket and Offers an Intimate Look at the Great Recession's Villains
By Bridey Heing | June 21, 2017 | 2:35pm
Author photo by Streeter Phillips
BOOKS FEATURES ANGELICA BAKER
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The 2008 Great Recession had one of the most significant impacts on the way we understand the United States’ political, economic and social standing today. The predatory practices of the country’s largest banks and major financial institutions’ remain a lightning rod for how we talk about inequality; the resulting crash forever marked Wall Street as code for extreme upper-class disdain and its willingness to destroy individuals on lower rungs of the economic ladder.
The story we tell about the financial crisis—and the people responsible for the pain it has wreaked—has crystallized into near unchallengeable legend. But in her debut novel Our Little Racket, Angelica Baker complicates that narrative by examining the crisis from an obscured angle: through the eyes of the women who lived alongside the men responsible for it. In exploring five women’s perspectives, Baker unravels what it means to be in close proximity to those who are doing wrong.
“There was a period of time when it felt like everybody was holding their breath and waiting to see what happened,” Baker tells Paste. “Now we know nothing really changed. But for a while, it did seem like everyone was waiting to see how things were going to reorder themselves.”
The more Baker thought about the financial crisis and subsequent narrative that emerged around the men who controlled Wall Street, the more fascinated she became by the men’s families. “As I started reading about the people involved, I thought, ‘What would it be like to be in that family, waiting for everyone to tell you what it meant about you?’”
Our Little Racket follows the women who surround Bob D’Amico, the CEO at a fictional investment bank on the brink of investigation and possible collapse. As Bob spends more and more time at the office—and as rumors about the impending crisis begin to swirl around the gated community where he and his family make their home—his wife Isabel, his daughter Madison and his children’s nanny Lily struggle to understand what is happening as they defend their home from prying eyes. Isabel’s friend Mina is simultaneously competitive and supportive, while Madison’s friend Amanda has parents who are working to promote the narrative of guilt, creating an uncomfortable tension even in moments of close intimacy. The women must also grapple with where they stand in the growing public spectacle surrounding Bob and the company he ran—all under the scrutiny of a country eager to for some form of justice.
Bob himself is the heart of the story, yet he remains deeply obscured from the reader. His image in the novel is shaped by female characters; his wife and daughter know his passion, temper and secrecy, while the wives of his colleagues waffle between self-protection and compassion for the D’Amico family.
Male characters’ obscurity in the novel isn’t a coincidence. Although Baker didn’t set out to write from only women’s perspectives, she says it was something that emerged naturally. “Every time I added a character, it became clear what I was doing. I had no interest in Bob’s perspective; I was only interested in the women.”
Baker likens her novel’s structure to a Greek chorus, with women who observe and respond to the narrative’s action but do not directly influence it. She believes the public can identify with the strain of being able to only watch and wait, even if the characters’ position might create distance. After all, the Wall Street men’s families were hardly the true victims of the financial crisis. But Baker’s novel interrogates the way the families were impacted on an intimate level, even as they were coming to terms with their own culpability.
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“There was an extent to which a lot of us were in that place in 2008,” she says. “What would you have learned if that was your father, or your friend, or your husband?”
If the novel’s premise sounds like it could be overly sympathetic to the crash’s architects and their beneficiaries, the depth of Baker’s characters helps to avoid such simplification. All the women in the book possess a complex understanding of their own place in a highly insular world. Isabel, born into wealth and highly ambivalent about it, is closed off even with her own children. Lily, who began working as the D’Amico family’s nanny after finishing her degree, is torn between a sense of duty to the children and disgust at her employer’s actions. Madison, a normal teen living in extraordinary circumstances, has to balance flirting with her crush one minute and carrying out the performative social graces she knows are expected of her the next.
Performance is central to these women’s lives. There are shades of Big Little Lies or The Real Housewives series in the way the women size up one another and respond to potential social threats. “Your children are growing up side by side, competing for lots of things. Your husbands all work in the same industry more or less,” Baker summarizes, having grown up in a wealthy Los Angeles community herself. “The oversimplified way to say it is that these women are acting how they were in high school, but that sells it short. There’s a more complicated give-and-take taking place in a community like that.”
Baker’s novel succeeds in avoiding simple answers or takeaways. Our Little Racket challenges the existing narrative about Wall Street, but it doesn’t claim those responsible were innocent. Instead, Baker introduces a human element into a story that has become largely and impossibly stark; where we have come to expect black and white, she asks us to consider some gray, leaving more questions than answers.
“I think looking at the people at the edges can make us think about the role we all played and how we would have behaved in that situation,” she says, “and how easy it is to have one foot in and one foot out, and tell yourself you aren’t involved in something that’s wrong.”
Bridey Heing is a freelance writer based in Washington, DC. More of her work can be found here.
Our Little Racket
Stephanie Turza
113.16 (Apr. 15, 2017): p20.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Our Little Racket. By Angelica Baker. June 2017. 512p. Ecco, $27.99 (9780062641311).
Five very different women orbit Bob D'Amico, the CEO of a high-profile investment bank: his wife, Isabel; his wife's friend Mina; his daughter, Madison; her best friend, Amanda; and the nanny, Lily. While Bob is off in Manhattan attempting to steer Weiss & Partners out of a complete financial meltdown, the women all respond to the fallout in their own ways. They all live in Greenwich, Connecticut, the epicenter of country clubs, charity auctions, and gossip that could break the sound barrier. As the financial sector continues to collapse, Bob and the women start keeping a variety of secrets from one another, so nobody truly knows what's happening at any given time. 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. Though Bob is nominally the center of the story, teenage and tenacious Madison has the most satisfying story arc. Fans of Cristina Alger's The Darlings (2012) and Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney's The Nest (2016) will enjoy this engrossing and illuminating glimpse into Greenwich's upper crust.--Stephanie Turza
Turza, Stephanie
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Turza, Stephanie. "Our Little Racket." Booklist, 15 Apr. 2017, p. 20. General OneFile, link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A492536111/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=c28d5b31. Accessed 7 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A492536111
Our Little Racket
264.14 (Apr. 3, 2017): p46.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Our Little Racket
Angelica Baker. Ecco, $27.99 (512p) ISBN 978-0-06-264131-1
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)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Our Little Racket." Publishers Weekly, 3 Apr. 2017, p. 46. General OneFile, link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A489813672/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=6c5889ef. Accessed 7 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A489813672
Baker, Angelica: OUR LITTLE RACKET
(Feb. 15, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Baker, Angelica OUR LITTLE RACKET Ecco/HarperCollins (Adult Fiction) $27.99 6, 20 ISBN: 978-0-06-264131-1
The failure of an investment bank is bad news for the family of the CEO.Madison D'Amico, the teenage protagonist of Baker's debut, has been rigorously trained by her mother, Isabel, in the hyperawareness and discipline required of the rich and beautiful: eat grapefruit, say little, trust no one. This conditioning will shape the way she deals with the crisis that jolts her well-cushioned adolescence when her father's investment bank is shut down, with him to blame, and to be charged, for its failure. Over many lugubrious chapters, she and her ice-queen mother will suffer the bottomless, nervy schadenfreude of their Greenwich, Connecticut, community. Also miserable will be the family's nanny, Lily; Isabel's one female friend, Mina Dawes; and Madison's one female friend, Amanda, whose father is the journalist leading the charge against the CEO. After a couple weeks in hiding, D'Amico comes home to hole up in his study and, in a series of late-night conversations, confides the inside story nobody knows to his teenage daughter. Based on a series of epigraphs quoting Richard Fuld of Lehman Brothers--Fuld was called the Gorilla, D'Amico is called the Silverback, etc.--the story mirrors real events. Yet the lifestyles and financial maneuverings depicted all feel generic; if this is an insider's story, it doesn't read like one. There is a bewildering amount of interior monologue from the five main female characters; the most banal conversation is plotted, managed, and second-guessed to a deadening degree, creating endless low-level tension that goes nowhere. On the other hand, potentially interesting plotlines, like the one about the nanny's boyfriend's connection to a wannabe investigative blogger who is stalking Madison, are underdeveloped, then tied hastily in a bow in the final pages. A book that shows just how boring the rich truly are.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Baker, Angelica: OUR LITTLE RACKET." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2017. General OneFile, link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A480922027/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=6e9f321c. Accessed 7 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A480922027
Baker, Angelica. Our Little Racket
Laurie Cavanaugh
(June 23, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Library Journals, LLC
http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/reviews/xpress/884170-289/xpress_reviews-first_look_at_new.html.csp
Baker, Angelica. Our Little Racket. Ecco: HarperCollins. Jun. 2017. 512p. ISBN 9780062641311. $27.99; ebk. ISBN 9780062641335. F
[DEBUT] This ambitious debut novel about the emotional fallout in 2008 for the family of Bob D'Amico, a high-flying investment banker under criminal investigation, tries to go deep into the character of the women in his household--ice-queen wife Isabel and her teenage daughter Madison and loyal college-grad nanny Lily--but succeeds more in giving readers a snarky peek past the security gates and up the long driveways of the Greenwich, CT, homes of the well-off and the unbelievably well-off Wall Street moguls. The book is getting a lot of buzz and should appeal to readers of Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney's The Nest, Randy Susan Meyers's The Widow of Wall Street, and Holly Peterson's It Happened in the Hamptons.
Verdict Put this one in your beach bag for its dissection of the reshuffling of the social order when public scrutiny falls on a family in the small circle of the fabulously wealthy. [See Prepub Alert, 1/8/17.]--Laurie Cavanaugh, Thayer P.L., Braintree, MA
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Cavanaugh, Laurie. "Baker, Angelica. Our Little Racket." Xpress Reviews, 23 June 2017. General OneFile, link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A500135121/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=1710905b. Accessed 7 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A500135121
‘Our Little Racket’ exposes lifestyles of Greenwich rich and aimless
By Joe Meyers Updated 8:20 am, Friday, June 23, 2017
Photo: Contributed Photo / Contributed Photo / Connecticut Post Contributed
Photo: Contributed Photo / Contributed Photo
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You can expect to see many copies of “Our Little Racket” (HarperCollins) being pulled out of beach bags up and down the Fairfield County coastline this summer.
It’s not just that Angelica Baker’s debut novel is a classic page-turner about the lives of the rich and aimless — perennial beach-book fodder — but that she zeroes in on Greenwich and five women who are connected to a billionaire banker. 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.
Isabel is the gorgeous but glacial “old money” wife of Bob D’Amico, a wheeler dealer whose Manhattan banking empire is teetering on the brink of collapse. Madison is their teenage daughter who is starting to realize how little she knows about her dad. Amanda is Madison’s high school friend-turned-frenemy whose father is one of the high-profile journalists tearing away at Bob’s reputation. Mina is an up-from-the-middle-class socialite who begins to wonder if best friend Isabel is simply using her. And Lily is the D’Amico’s nanny, a bright young woman who has put her own career ambitions on hold for eight years because of the irresistible perks of her job.
Madison is the real protagonist of the novel, a born insider who is starting to see through a lot of the people she interacts with, including her own mother. In one scene, the daughter remarks that Isabel’s face “appeared scrubbed of makeup in a way that meant she had spent an hour applying foundation, powder, under-eye creams and forehead tightening gels. She looked healthy, rested. She’s put this together carefully.”
Isabel, who was born into wealth, is the envy of all the nouveau riche women of Greenwich for her casual elegance and perfect manners. “... This was still a body that any woman — a twenty-four-year-old, even — would want, would consider murder to have. Another reason ... the other, older wives hated Isabel, even as they angled for invites to her fundraisers,” the very knowing nanny Lily observes. “She wore the taut thighs, the flat stomach, the tennis player’s angled hips, just as she wore everything else. As something she’d inherited, without giving it another thought.”
With scenes taking place in the real movie theaters, shops and restaurants of Greenwich — and a scandalous finale set at a benefit for the Bruce Museum — “Our Little Racket” answers many of the questions we might have about the lifestyles of the well-heeled women we pass on upper Greenwich Avenue.
Baker didn’t grow up in the novel’s setting, but she worked as a nanny and a tutor in the vicinity and has, in her words, “been in and out of Greenwich a lot.” The author is a native of Los Angeles who did her undergraduate studies at Yale before settling in Brooklyn, N.Y.
“I grew up in a community in LA that was extremely wealthy. My family was certainly financially secure, but much more modest (than our neighbors). LA and Greenwich are different, but there is quite a lot of common ground in wealthy communities,” Baker says of comparing her Connecticut research with her own time in upper-class Southern California.
The combination of elegant writing and razor-sharp analysis of upper-class suburbia has already brought Baker comparisons with Richard Yates and John Cheever. The book has been cited by Barnes & Noble as a Summer 2017 Discover Great New Writers Pick.
If you are looking for the sort of people who could be potential friends when you read a novel, “Our Little Racket” might seem a little off-putting, but Baker takes us so deeply into the lives of her five women that it is easy to empathize with them as they wonder if Bob’s financial crimes might bring them all down.
Baker doesn’t understand the controversy that erupted a few years ago when a Publisher’s Weekly reporter told novelist Claire Messud she didn’t write the sort of “likeable” characters readers would want to hang out with. (Messud exploded and the result was a literary world, social-media firestorm.)
“I do think that debate is fairly ludicrous. When people say the characters in a book are ‘unlikeable,’ I think they’re just saying they didn’t enjoy the book. I don’t think Philip Roth ran into that criticism,” Baker says of the possible double-standard female novelists face.
The writer says she did wonder “if people wanted to read about them (the Greenwich women) and that year, but I think (it’s dangerous) to see one person as a symbol for an entire system. (I was aiming for) what it would feel like if it was someone you loved — your dad. Everyone is closely involved but deeply excluded.”
What adds poignancy to the book is that the women could be described as friendless, even though Mina and Amanda are still going through the motions as an icy wall goes up between them and Isabel and Madison.
“Part of what emerges in the characters’ lives is that they are incredibly isolated. I think that is universal to these (super wealthy) communities,” she says. “They don’t have what I would describe as friendships. (Simply) bringing people into your home as a hostess doesn’t count.”
Everyone in the book lives in Greenwich, but none of them are deeply rooted in the community. They are there only because the powerful men in their lives could afford the real estate.
“All of my characters are people with one foot on the inside and one foot on the outside. ... I think that can be the most interesting perspective — people within and without,” she says of the women who are about to be fodder for lots of summer book conversations.
jmeyers@hearstmediact.com;
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