In The Dream Merchant, Fred Waitzkin explores how good people's momentary ethical and moral lapses can result in destruction and ruin. As Jim, a 75-year-old salesman at the twilight of his career, makes a last-ditch effort to close the deal with a young, live-in lover, he reminisces about the key episodes of his narcissistic life to an unnamed narrator.
It is 1983 when the narrator, a 30-something journalist, meets Jim in a Bahamian bar and falls in love with his sense of adventure, flamboyance and wealth. Fast forward 20 years: Jim is now penniless, abandoning his latest wife for the erotically charged Mara, to whom he sells a diminishing past of privilege and wealth. He engages the narrator to write a memoir of his fairytale life, from humble beginnings in poverty on the Canadian plains to a rise up the economic ladder through pyramid and Ponzi schemes. Jim's insatiable ambition pushes an adoring trophy wife to dark impulses and secret affairs; he drowns his heartbreak with the pursuit of gold in the Amazonian jungle. As Jim's story progresses, the narrator's tone turns critical, as he himself recognizes: "Many of us are like this, making boxes for the loves we love, stuffing them back inside."
Waitzkin expertly psychoanalyzes his characters, juxtaposing the good and the bad of each to chilling effect. Jim's story is at once mesmerizing, erotically charged and repulsive--emotions echoed brilliantly by Waitzkin's ever prescient voice of reason. --Nancy Powell, freelance writer and technical consultant