The Fall Of Princes Pdf Summary Reviews By Robert Goolrick

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The Fall Of Princes Pdf Summary

In the Spellbinding new novel for #1 New York Times bestselling author Robert Goolrick, 1980’s Manhattan shimmers like the mirage it was, as money, power, and invincibility seduce a group of young Wall Street turks. Together they reach the pinnacle, achieving the kind of wealth that grants them access to anything – and anyone – they want. Until, one by one, they fall.

With the literary chops of Bonfire of the Vanities and the dizzying decadence of The Wolf of Wall Street, The Fall of Princes takes readers into a world of hedonistic highs and devastating lows, weaving a visceral tale about the lives of these young men, winners all . . . until someone changes the rules of the game. Goolrick paints a magnificently authentic portrait of an era, tense and stylish, perfectly mixing adrenaline and melancholy.

Stunning in its acute observations about great wealth and its absence, and deeply moving in its deception of the ways in which these men learn to cope with both extremes, the novel travels from New York to Paris to Los Angeles to Italy to Las Vegas to London, on a journey that is as startling as it is starkly revealing, a true tour de force

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The Fall Of Princes Review

Dave Schwinghammer

VINE VOICE

4.0 out of 5 stars Money Won’t Make You Happy
Reviewed in the United States on October 8, 2015

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I have read Robert Goolrick’s two previous novels, HEADING OUT TO WONDERFUL and A RELIABLE WIFE. If I had still been doing a top twenty List Mania for Amazon, I would have put both of them on the list for the year they were published.

Alhough not as readable as the previous two, THE FALL OF PRINCES is more significant in that it addresses an ongoing controversy: how rich do you have to be before enough is enough? Rooney, the major character in the novel, works as a Wall Street trader. At one point he does well enough to earn a “yard and a half” bonus at the end of the year. A yard is a million dollars. But, alas, the partying got to him and he was fired, ending up working as a manager for Barnes and Noble.

Rooney never wanted to be a Wall Street wheeler dealer. He had a fellowship to work on his art in Europe for two years. He thought his work was crap and took his father’s advise and went to business school. But business school didn’t get him his job; the Firm he went to work for didn’t take investments under ten million dollars. He got his job because he beat his boss at a poker hand. You’ll have to read the book to find out how he did that.

There’s also lots of sex involved in the book; Rooney wasn’t very selective at the height of the AIDS epidemic; he was bi-sexual, although he does not mention any of his male partners. He was also married to one of the richest women in high society. She ditched him when he got fired, but he claims he’ll always love her. We meet her again, but she doesn’t seem all that lovable to me.

Rooney really isn’t such a bad guy. He forms a relationship with a transexual prostitute named Holly, and they become platonic friends. She works on the street when it’s kind of cold out, and he let’s her warm up in his apartment once or twice a week. She even cleans his ratty apartment without being asked. Ultimately she tells him she’s fallen in love. Again. She ruined her first relationship when her lover gave her money to have the operation, and she spent it on a couple of sailors she met on the way. Who has she fallen in love with? It’s Rooney, and he considers it the highest compliment he’s ever received. And when he gets down, he knows that somebody loves him. Inexplicably she disappears right after she tells him.

The ending is rather confusing. Rooney insists on buying good sheets, the one rich person habit he refuses to give up; at one point he says only one part of his bed gets mussed. So then he’s asexual, right? But when he meets his ex-wife, Carmela, at the book store, he tells her he’s a homosexual, but he’s not any good at it. He was much better with women. So, is he or isn’t he?

I’ve read an uncomplimentary review about this book, but I get the impression that the author has some experience in this milieu, if his acknowledgments mean anything. So we get to learn something about Wall Street that confirms the old saw: money won’t make you happy.

HDOBO

3.0 out of 5 stars Unexpected…the end saves it.
Reviewed in the United States on September 17, 2015

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Goolrick is a strong, compelling writer. His memoir and two fiction novels were exceptional. It is unfair to expect an author to write in the same manner with every text. Unfair and puerile to not expect experimentation and change from a creative person. However, this novel seemed labored and repetitive (especially in the first third to half), not really coming into its own until the end when the protagonist had met the transsexual hooker and retold the story of his experience with the singing hooker — commodified sexuality and powerful asexual relationships are strong tropes with this author; he is at his best in his exploration of these issues. They seem to hold sway with him, and his readers benefit from his intense interest in these motifs.

Like others have noted, I struggled initially because the narrator reveals a history, which makes him arrogant and a difficult character with whom to connect because of a certain entitled amorality, despite the multiple references to his desire for an artist life. But, this went away — the protagonist doesn’t need to be likable or even trustworthy to be worthy of investment. The challenge perhaps with this novel is that both the subject matter — the vanity and excess of a bygone era and its costs to those who indulged — and the narrative style — reflective/stream of consciousness meets meditation — seemed to struggle in a contest against the “heart” of the novel, which only revealed itself at the end.

This is really a book about many things, but it seems to want to explore the issues of sex, sexuality, sexual identity and HIV/AIDS as well as social, personal and cultural stigma and transformation seen from the 80s to the 2010s…but it doesn’t, not really. It spends time circling these issues, then spews them forth in a diatribe at the end, that if it had been paced well would have actually made reading more enjoyable and compelling.

Perhaps, though, this is the point. The central character doesn’t become a “real” human being until he has lost everything and processes his out-of-placedness in the 2010s (a fragility that is hinted at in various moments in the novel). Perhaps, clarity isn’t achieved until all is lost, but regained somehow through punishment on some sort of crucible — is this the central message? If so, perhaps the narrative structure seeks to mirror this. I’m not sure. I don’t feel the worse for having read it. I appreciate the opportunity to read something for which I had entirely different expectations. I hope Goolrick continues to experiment with his authorial voice.

I won’t write that I am disappointed — I waited expectantly for this novel (I imagine Goolrick felt this from his many avid fans) and I’m aware that expectations always color reality. I’ll need to think more about this text, what it means, what it tried to mean and why it was written as it was.

About Robert Goolrick Author Of The Fall Of Princes pdf Book

Robert Goolrick Author Of The Fall Of Princes pdf Book was born in a small university town in Virginia, a town in which, besides teaching, the chief preoccupations were drinking bourbon and telling complex anecdotes, stories about people who lived down the road, stories about ancestors who had died a hundred years before. For southerners, the past is as real as the present; it is not even past, as Faulkner said.

I went to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and then lived in Europe for several years, thinking that I would be an actor or a painter, two things for which I had a passion that outran my talent. I wrote an early novel, and then my parents disinherited me, so I moved to New York, which is where small-town people move to do and say the things they can’t do or say at home, and I ended up working in advertising, a profession that feeds on young people who have an amorphous talent and no particular focus.

Fired in my early fifties, the way people are in advertising, I tried to figure out what to do with the rest of my life, and I came back around to the pastime that had filled the days and nights of my childhood: telling complex anecdotes about the living and the dead. I think, when we read, we relish and devour remarkable voices, but these are, in the end, stories we remember.

I live in a tiny town in Virginia in a great old farmhouse on a wide and serene river with my dog, whose name is Preacher. Since he has other interests besides listening to my stories, I tell them to you.