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book review

The Hunger of the Wolf is the new novel from author Stephen Marche.Handout

'Balzac said that behind every great fortune is a great crime," writes Jamie Cabot, the narrator of Stephen Marche's dizzyingly impressive new novel The Hunger of the Wolf. Cabot is reflecting on the Wylie family, staggeringly rich and deliberately anonymous, following the discovery of the body of Ben Wylie in the Alberta wilderness by a pair of Cree brothers: "Only after they had delivered up the body would the brothers learn that the man in the snow, far from being nobody, was the eighth-richest person in the world. Curled naked in the killing cold lay twenty-seven billion dollars," the man's estimated worth.

The Wylies, adds Cabot, "had never been involved in any morally suspect businesses, and not for lack of opportunity."

The remainder of The Hunger of the Wolf details not only the rise of the Wylie empire, but also traces Cabot's attempt to discover and to publicize the critical secret underlying the family's successes.

His future depends on it. Cabot, who grew up in Alberta in the shadow of the Wylies' summer cabin (his family served as caretakers for the visiting Americans, who would typically arrive, unannounced, via float plane), has just lost his job as a journalist, and is struggling to do anything – anything – to avoid having to leave New York. Piecing together a shaky freelance life, Cabot finds himself "in that state of unwilling, pleasureless gamble known as 'without benefits.' I couldn't afford for a single thing to go wrong. And I was in my mid-thirties, that time of life when you realize that the one thing life inevitably does is go wrong."

During a fortuitous trip home, Cabot breaks into the Wylie cabin, as he has done many times before. This time, though, he discovers a carefully concealed cache of papers that not only chronicle the rise of the family and their fortunes, but reveal the secret that has haunted them over the generations. Cabot sees his opportunity. Taking the papers back with him to New York, and scheduling interviews with surviving family members, Cabot pitches exposés of the family to several publications: Their secrets will be his salvation. "If I could uncover their story, I could sell their story, and if I could sell their story, I might have something like a future in New York."

The Hunger of the Wolf follows two narrative strands – the multigenerational saga of the Wylie family and the struggle of the freelance journalist to survive in New York – both anchored by the central mystery introduced in its opening lines: How did Ben Wylie, one of the richest men in the world, end up naked and dead in remote Alberta?

Marche, who in addition to being a respected writer is also a journalist and cultural critic for such publications as Esquire and The Atlantic, draws on all of his disparate talents and skill sets for his latest novel. His prose is incisive and insightful, seemingly throwaway observations (such as "New York was filling up with overeducated drifters and overweight homeless" and "the party smelled of cocaine farts") piercing to deeper truths and quickly attaining a weight of authority. Cabot, largely an observer on the periphery of wealth and its gifts, seems to move in a world familiar to Marche; whether this is a talent for observation or rooted in his life in New York, where he lived for several years, is irrelevant: It reads like truth.

That position – on the periphery – will remind many readers of The Great Gatsby, and that echo seems deliberate, although it's not quite that simple. The Hunger of the Wolf is crafted as a fundamentally American novel, part Horatio Alger story, part The Great Gatsby, part Citizen Kane. Marche has cultivated a high level of antecedents for the novel, and The Hunger of the Wolf largely rises to meet them.

The novel isn't perfect, though. By the last quarter of the book, Marche seems to have lost sight of the guiding narrative strand, and the matter of what happened to Ben Wylie is resolved almost off-handedly, as if it is, ultimately, of little importance. Similarly, the significance of Cabot's realizations in the novel's closing pages feel somewhat unearned, its profundity undercut by a sudden and surprising lack of authority so late in the game.

Marche, however, makes up for these weaknesses somewhat in the way that the two separate narrative strands draw together, as Cabot's life shifts as a result of what he discovers about the Wylie family. Not what he can sell, mind you, but what he can apply to himself. As he writes, portentously, early in the book, "Money can turn into everything, but we can only turn into ourselves." It's a valuable, troubling lesson, and one that Cabot ultimately takes to heart.

Robert J. Wiersema's new novel, Black Feathers, comes out in August.

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