Philip Hadi used to be one of these people. After being swindled by a financial advisor, what future can Mark promise his wife, Karen, and their young daughter, Haley? He finds himself envying the wealthy weekenders in his community whose houses sit empty all winter. Mark Firth is a contractor and home restorer in Howland, Massachusetts, who feels opportunity passing his family by. (Aug.A rural working-class New England town elects as its mayor a New York hedge fund millionaire in this inspired novel for our times - fiction in the tradition of Jonathan Franzen and Jennifer Egan. He creates tension as a reckoning day arrives, and strikes the perfect ending note. Dee, who wrote about a wealthy segment of society in The Privileges, handles the plot with admirable skill, finding empathy for his bewildered characters. Alcohol in excess and secret sexual trysts help ease the pain, but jobs are scarce and families drift apart. “I feel like the world is trying to get rid of me. A dozen or so more characters round out this picture of a community on the economic skids, whose citizens seethe with a sense of futility and resentment as old values and traditions fade.

Gerry, meanwhile, has been writing a blog that criticizes the town’s new first selectman, a rich ex-Wall Street hedge fund manager who, postelection, is rapidly exerting his power as an authoritarian politician. When the next opportunity to get rich seems possible, Mark reluctantly enlists his brother, Gerry, a feckless real estate salesman, as his partner. As Mark’s wife, Karen, perceives, however, Mark is gullible and guileless, and he is devastated when he loses his savings to a con man. A hard worker in the construction trade, a devoted husband and father and a man of strong moral principles, he wants to parlay his earnings into stock market investments. Mark Firth’s family has lived in or near the fictional town of Howland in the Massachusetts Berkshires for generations. His blue-collar characters, each of them pursuing the American Dream, are vividly developed, and his insights into how they think about the government (ineffective and corrupt) and their rights as citizens (ignored, trampled) are timely. Small-town America in the aftermath of 9/11 is the setting for Dee’s engrossing new novel.

The Locals by Jonathan Dee