Potlatch: A Comedy

By: Bruce Hartman

Narrated by: Audra Cook

Have you ever wondered why life seems so complicated, so exhausting, so fattening, and yet so pointless and idiotic? It's all part of the Potlatch.

To Alice Coggins, the 24-year-old daughter of a South Philadelphia scam artist, everything looks like a racket: endless serf-like internships, student loans that can never be repaid, and high-minded charities run by swindlers for the benefit of rich donors. Things only get worse when she meets Andrew Ogleby, a scion of blue-bloods who is engaged to a bulimic pet-food heiress he can't bring himself to marry. As their Cinderella romance unfolds, Alice and Andrew must battle their families, the mob, and most of all the ubiquitous "Potlatch": a vast conspiracy of conspicuous waste directed by the powers that be to keep the populace - and especially the young people - from even thinking about doing anything useful.

©2017 Bruce Hartman (P)2018 Bruce Hartman

Either way...

I love this series. The wit goes right over the top and turns to farce and descends in the end to pulsing humanity. It's excellent work, making scathing commentary on modern finance by illuminating the lives of the "least important" economic forces -- ordinary people, from the most venal to the most innocent.

The reader is an interesting choice. After a brief time when my eyebrows got lost in my hairline, I got rather a kick out of this twisty, sardonic story being told in a butter-wouldn't-melt-in-her mouth voice which generally borders on the sweetly robotic. She does very good contrasting character voices, which is even stranger somehow. I'd rather the narrative voice be a bit more gritty, but it sure is a telling contrast to the material.