Warning: The first part of this review consists of my idle musings on a topic that occurred to me while reading this book. If you don't give a damn about that and just want to get on with the review, skip down. 
 Ever notice how it seems like the same idea start showing up in a variety of tv shows, films, or books at roughly the same time? I'm not talking about the straight-up rip-offs that appear when something like The DaVinci Code hits it big or when trends like vampires or zombies become hot and spark countless films, books, comics, etc. to cash in. 
 I'm talking about when a specific idea seems to come up repeatedly. For example, back in the '90s, Grosse Pointe Blank had a gag where a hit man was talking to a therapist. A year later, Lawrence Block had his contract killer Keller talking to a shrink in the book Hit Man.* Two years after that, psychiatrist Billy Crystal was giving advice to a mobbed-up Robert DeNiro in Analyze This. That same year saw the beginning of Tony Soprano's relationship with Dr. Melfi. 
 * Correction - Someone pointed out in the comments that Block wrote the short story Keller In Therapy before Grosse Pointe Blank came out. In the novel Hit Man Block took several Keller short stories and used them as bits for the novel, and I had only read the novel not the stories so I didn't realize that Block had beaten GPB to the punch as far as the idea of a hit man talking to a therapist. As a Lawrence Block fan, this makes me happy. 
 None of these really seem like any form of plagiarism. Even though they all traded on the idea of a professional criminals talking to psychiatrists, they all did very different things with the concept. Yet, it always bugged me a little. I feel like David Chase, creator of The Sopranos, should be sending royalty checks and gift baskets to the Gross Pointe Blank screenwriters Lawrence Block. 
 I got that same feeling while reading The Financial Lives of the Poets when a broke suburbanite turns to dealing pot to save his house. Didn't Weeds already do this story? And hasn't Breaking Bad earned acclaim for having a dweeb science teacher turn to dealing meth when facing cancer and huge medical bills? 
 Other than that basic idea of a desperate law-abiding citizen becoming a drug dealer due to financial hardship, these stories have little else in common. And the idea of the ordinary person turning to crime due to extenuating circumstances has been done a million different ways. You can't copyright a basic idea. (e.g. Superman led to countless rip-offs, but DC quickly found out that as long as the costumes and powers were slightly different, they lost most of their lawsuits because they couldn't own the superhero concept.) But whenever I notice an incident of these similar ideas, it makes me think about where the line is as far as specific plot points. 
 We now resume your regularly scheduled review. 
 Matt Prior is in a bit of a pickle. He used to be a financial reporter who let the skyrocketing value of his home and a few good stock picks blind him to the huge debt he was accumulating. Plus, he made the spectacularly bad decision of quitting his newspaper job to start a website that combined financial news and poetry. When the bottom dropped out of the economy in 2008, Matt finds himself jobless and on the verge of losing his house. 
 He also has to try and take care of his father, who is suffering from dementia, and he's pretty sure that his wife's flirtation with an old boyfriend on Facebook is turning into something more serious. Plus, if he can't afford the private school tuition for his two sons, he's convinced that the shitty public school in his area will only teach his boys how to sharpen plastic spoons into shivs. 
 When Matt does a late night convenience store run for milk, he meets some young stoners and ends up getting high with them. Realizing that the pot of today is much improved from the marijuana of his youth and that all the middle-aged people he knows would welcome the chance to buy some high-grade weed, Matt hatches a desperate scheme to use the last of his money to buy a couple of pounds of pot from his new stoner pals and re-sell it. 
 This was an incredibly well-written book that uses dark humor to explore the economic abyss that many people found themselves in after the real estate bubble burst. Matt's predicament is all too familiar, and his sadly funny reflections on how he followed the 'expert' financial advice right over the cliff is a grim reminder of how bad things have been for some people in the last couple of years. The book also deals with the guilt that Matt feels for not realizing sooner that his high-debt lifestyle could only have led to disaster. 
 I had never heard of Jess Walter and picked this book up when the title caught my eye, and I saw a gajillion raving blurbs on the cover. I'll definitely be checking out more of his work.