Summer's Last Beach Read

On those final few trips to the shore, take along Michael M. Thomas’ Love & Money, a sleek, savvy novel that will transport you back to a time when spending was cool.

Toward the end of my previous incarnation as a book publisher and editor, I seem to recall having lunch with the erudite and charming Michael Thomas at The Four Seasons restaurant in New York, to discuss an idea he had for a novel. I tried to avoid doing this kind of thing, normally—I don’t mind reading novels, you understand, but I don’t like being told about them.

I’m not a snob—if Tolstoy were alive and tried to tell me the story of Anna Karenina across the luncheon table (“She’s married to this cold and distant fellow, she has an affair with a dashing army officer, see? Then she leaves her husband and children for him, and when it doesn’t work out she throws herself under a train...”), I would slip into a state in which my mind was set on “sleep,” like a computer.

The pleasure lies not in the cookies, but in the pattern the crumbs make when the cookies crumble.

However, I would always have made an exception for Michael Thomas, whose conversation and range of interests is amazing, and who has had more careers than any one person is entitled to: columnist, museum curator, novelist, investment banker, and I’m only just getting started.

Anyway, he talked at length about the moral and constitutional ramifications of no-fault divorce law, a subject which doesn’t normally grip my attention (I’ve been through one divorce, and don’t remember the experience with any pleasure), though if anybody could make it interesting, it would be Michael Thomas. The normal reaction of a publisher when faced with an author with a bee in his bonnet is to grab the check and run. To be fair, I think Michael picked up the check, so if I didn’t thank him properly for lunch then, I would like to do so now.

I am also happy to say that despite any doubts I may have had then, Thomas seems to have brought it off in his latest book, Love & Money (the ampersand is correct, and makes a point). It’s a beach read, but a superior and elegant one, and if you have any beach time left, it would be a good book to take with you. At least its grownup characters don’t drink blood, which is more than you can say of most of the fiction bestseller list. In fact, it’s really a roman à clef, with a number of recognizable characters: a married woman who just might remind you of Martha Stewart, her movie-producer husband, a soulless media mogul (no Australian accent, so no, not that one), a conniving cardinal, a smart divorce lawyer, and a woman who controls a huge family business and is eager to build a museum that will rival the Met.

Love & Money by Michael M. Thomas Melville House 320 pages $16.95 The game is not so much in the characters themselves—the Martha Stewart lookalike is the strongest and most interesting of them—but in the complex way in which a single, almost random, unpremeditated event brings them all together. In other words, the pleasure lies not in the cookies, but in the pattern the crumbs make when the cookies crumble, as it’s clear they will from page 19 on. (The first 18 pages are a long sex scene, and it’s pretty good as sex scenes go, but as the former editor of Harold Robbins, Irving Wallace, Shirley Conran, Jackie Collins, Joan Collins, and several more, I have long since been inoculated to the obligatory sex scene of popular fiction, most of which read as if they had been cut and pasted out of a menu of pre-prepared sex scenes, and have the same relationship to sexual excitement that frozen food has to freshly prepared food.)

Really, what Michael Thomas is good at is writing about people who loom larger than life, the kind of people who make news in the columns, who make deals in the millions or billions of dollars, and whose Rolodexes contain the telephone numbers of people the reader can’t imagine ever calling on the phone.