Bookshelf: 'Bad Marie' is good, 'Dear Money' is rich

Literary antiheroines seem to be fewer than their male counterparts. There's Scarlett O'Hara. There's Emma Bovary. And now there's Marcy Dermansky's "Bad Marie" (Harper Perennial, $13.99 paper), an antiheroine for our time, who's just been released after a six-year jail sentence. "Sometimes Marie still could not believe that she had gone to jail. She had run off with her boyfriend; it had been young love. She had done nothing wrong. She had not robbed the bank. She had not shot the security guard. The court-appointed lawyer didn't put up much of a defense for Marie. The white middle-class jury looked at Marie and Juan José with thinly veiled disgust and she was charged and sentenced, an accessory to murder."

Life has never been fair to Marie, and she makes up for it by taking what she can get. For example, her mom was a selfish, uncaring cow while her schoolmate Ellen Kendall had a beautiful, doting mother who fed children artichokes and took them to museums. But Mrs. Kendall belonged to Ellen, not Marie - like Ellen's first boyfriend, whom Marie slept with. Now Ellen has hired Marie fresh out of jail to work as a nanny, but Marie runs away to Paris with both Ellen's novelist husband and her 2-year-old daughter, Caitlin. She also takes Ellen's red silk kimono, some silver bangles and her lavender bubble bath. And it's these things, dumped out on the table in a Paris bistro, that lead Benoît Doniel, the stolen husband, to an inevitable conclusion.

"You really are a thief," he says, pressing his abandoned wife's stolen bathrobe to his cheek.

But Benoît is a thief himself, and a poseur. The fate that has miraculously united Marie with the man who wrote the very book that got her through years of incarceration turns out to be quite capricious - interested not in happy endings but in devilish turnabouts. How can you get a happy ending when the world is filled with such bad, weak people: not one but two self-absorbed movie stars, judgmental waiters, whole families of unfriendly, impoverished Mexicans?

The single good person in this book is baby Caitlin, who is Marie's love and her moral compass. When Marie pants at the precipice of her worst choice of all, the little girl is the one who calls it. "Silly Marie," she says. Not bad. Just silly.

A page-turning melodrama told with chilled cosmopolitan irony, the moral puzzles at the heart of "Bad Marie" linger after the delicious meringue of the book has been consumed. Cool trick, Ms. Dermansky.

- MARION WINIK

Unsurprisingly, most recent fiction about financial-industry chicanery has been serious stuff - take, for instance, Adam Haslett's "Union Atlantic" or Jonathan Dee's "The Privileges." But why not a comedy? What subject could be riper for satire than the high-flying, self-deluded fraternity of Wall Street traders?

Martha McPhee's giddy new novel, "Dear Money" (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $25), is a Pygmalion tale for the late Gilded Age - the one that just came crashing down around our ears. The narrator, India Palmer, is a mid-list literary novelist whose books enjoy decent reviews and poor sales. She and her husband, a sculptor, struggle to maintain their top-shelf Manhattan lifestyle ("the private school, the out-of-network doctors . . . the dinners I liked to have, the lessons for the girls") on their limited income.

Visiting wealthy friends at their summer home in Maine, India meets "Win" Johns, a high-powered mortgage trader who makes his entrance, absurdly (and perfectly), flying a yellow biplane. Over the weekend, a mutual seduction plays out between Win and India, but the interest is not romantic - or not strictly romantic. "Give me 18 months," Win tells India, "and I'll turn you into a trader."

So begin India's adventures at the Bond & Bond Brothers investment house. India is successful, drunk on the language of "mortgage universe": "People were making markets," she explains. "People locked markets. People were 'going fishing.' People were 'on the follow' and 'throwing the flag.' Deals were rinsed, killed, crushed and spun." Who better than a novelist to spin a compelling (but purely fictional) story to buyers? "I've earned their trust, so they believe what I tell them." Above all, the former starving artist is "in love with her proximity to so much money."

McPhee wraps up this financial fable not long before the 2007 meltdown, but we know what India will have to learn the hard way: Every bubble must burst.

- TOM BEER