Quick Reads: “Odds Against Tomorrow” by Nathaniel Rich

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Monika Bauerlein,
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December is make-or-break for Mother Jones’ fundraising, and in "No Cute Headlines or Manipulative BS," we hope that giving it to you as matter-of-fact as we can will work to raise the $350,000 we need to raise this month. Donations make up 74 percent of our budget this year, and all online gifts will be matched and go twice as far until we hit our goal.

Odds Against Tomorrow

By Nathaniel Rich

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FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX

Did Nathaniel Rich see Sandy coming? His protagonist did. Rich’s second novel follows Mitchell Zuckor, a perpetually fearful Wall Street quant whose lucrative niche is calculating the odds of worst-case scenarios—fires, floods, power grid collapses, pandemic viruses—and helping corporate clients plan for the unthinkable. When a hurricane inundates New York City, Zuckor embarks on a post-apocalyptic adventure in an objet d’art canoe bought at a gallery for 29 grand. It’s fiction, thank heaven, but fiction with an edge: Zuckor’s job description and his paranoid calculations are well grounded in reality, and Odds Against Tomorrow underscores the tenuous line between order and chaos.