All in the family
February 24, 2010 |12:41 | Other Books By : Team X
Adam Haslett’s Union Atlantic is a timely, even prescient, work of fiction. Finished in September 2008, the very week that Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy, the novel offers a lucid perspective on the manner in which the greed and venality of a privileged few can drive the economy toward and beyond the brink of collapse.
To paraphrase the words of one of the principal characters, a retired historian, Union Atlantic is an effort to portray “history’s reckless imagination” of the 21st-century world.
The novel begins with a prologue set in the port of Bahrain in early July 1988, shortly after the USS Vincennes, a guided missile cruiser, shot down an Iranian civilian airliner as it was crossing the Straits of Hormuz.
Here we meet Doug Fanning, a member of the ship’s bridge crew, and possibly the man who pushed the button that sent the 290 people onboard Iran Air 655 to their deaths. It’s been three years since Fanning left his mother without a word and joined the Navy, and now, in the aftermath of the downing of the Iranian plane, he is already planning the next step of the career that will take him from the Navy to, some 12 years later, his position as a senior manager at Union Atlantic, a rapidly expanding commercial bank.
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