Extravagance: A Novel
by By Krist, Gary
Category: Fiction , Literary

William Tobias Merrick, an energetic young man from the provinces, travels to the big city in a time of great optimism and ferment, hoping to make his mark on a frenzied, money-crazed society obsessed with the promise of new technologies. The city in question is London in the 1690s, but it is also New York in the 1990s. The new technologies are diving bells, pneumatic winches, and "sucking worm" drainage engines; but they are also wireless telecommunication devices, patented biotechnology processes, and revolutionary electronic Internet routers. Only the sense of unlimited possibility remains the same throughout.In his new novel, Gary Krist does something unique in the history of fiction: tell the exact same story with the same set of characters in two separate times and settings, in language appropriate to each. Unfolding simultaneously in two distant - but remarkably similar - periods of history, Extravagance is a comic picaresque novel of financial mania, the story of a world gripped by a terminal case of irrational exuberance.