The Dismal Science question

The misery begins early when Vincenzo recalls through flashbacks his daughter’s skiing accident, which resulted in a below the knee amputation, Leonora now a waitress in a diner. Also described, his wife’s accident, when while wearing noise cancelling earphones with a no-skip CD player, she stepped onto an avenue and was “struck down by a truck full of shovels.” That they were strewn on Massachusetts Avenue, and maybe her body, was not mentioned. What was, within pages, his bedding of a former Word Bank co-worker, described by our protagonist as “about as exciting as running on a treadmill before breakfast.” And yet on the same page we have this: “Eventually, just as he was about to fake an orgasm, something happened. The depleted hormones, or synapses---or was it a dormant part of the soul?---whatever had been absent so far came back to him, lit up all at once.”

As to the narrative itself, the precipitating event occurs in the third chapter, the back story finally yielding to the now of this novel, when a meeting is arranged between William Hamilton, the executive director of The World Bank, and Vincenzo, its manager and senior economist. Funds for Bolivia are cast into question by Hamilton who fears that Evo Morales, ahead in the polls by double digits, will be elected its new president and turn out to be a saner Hugo Chavez, a younger Fidel Castro. He demands that Vincenzo cut back on aid. They get into an argument, tempers flare and in a fit of pique, Vincenzo resigns. There is in the next chapter a long dissertation on Machiavelli, which might seem a little heavy handed given what has just transpired, but eventually we get to Vincenzo’s new life of being alone. There are, occasionally, visits with his daughter and her no account boyfriend. And with his friend a newspaper man who shares a love for Chess, which they play at various locations, including Bolivia later in the novel. When things slow to after a visit with a Lehman Brothers account manager who thinks he might benefit from Leo’s presence.
But the talked about offer hangs like a shirt left at the cleaners, one never picked up. The narrative eventually gets the energy boost it so badly needs. In large part because of the young woman who serves as Evo Morales’s press manager. A more informal version than Jay Carney, she meets him at the airport, standing with her eyes closed, her mouth open. “Could it be?” our author asks, “Yes, she was sleeping on her feet.” Further on there’s this: “He hurried after her, dragging his large suitcase and mesmerized by the way her hips popped when she walked.” Yes, that would get your attention, though mesmerized might not be the word chosen.

Near the end, before a large audience of mostly Bolivians, Vincenzo delivers a speech. Not his best, and there are consequences I won’t describe, except to say that they are in keeping with the spirit of this intelligently told story that for stretches at a time overshadow the stumbles of Vincenzo on the road to self worth.