The Wagers

by Sean Michaels

Overview

From Giller-Prize-winning author Sean Michaels, The Wagers is a wild and magical novel about what it means to not only chase luck, but find it.

When Theo Potiris performed his stand-up comedy act on Conan at 25, he thought he’d hit it big. But ten years later, he's still spending his days working at his parents’ grocery store, bicycling to the local open mic, and writing letters to a girlfriend who lives halfway around the world. Theo’s desperate for a break. But when he brings his thirteen-year-old niece to the horse track to place a birthday bet—a Potiris family tradition—the goddess of good luck strikes her instead, in the form of a small fortune. Try as he might to be happy for her, Theo’s shock and envy finally push him out of the family nest, away from his comedy dreams and toward a new calling.

First: a mysterious corporation called The Rabbit’s Foot, which carefully quantifies and cashes in on luck. Then: to a gang of vigilantes, who recruit Theo to help them steal luck from those who carry more than their fair share. The Wagers is a literary motorcycle chase, carried by stylish prose and delightful invention. But it’s also an investigation of work and purpose, happiness and art, the randomness of good fortune, and all the ways we choose to wage our lives.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781947793637
Publisher:	Tin House Books
Publication date:	01/21/2020
Pages:	398
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Sean Michaels was born in Stirling, Scotland, raised in Ottawa, and eventually settled in Montreal, where he founded the pioneering music blog Said the Gramophone. His award-winning writing has also appeared in The Observer, McSweeney's, The Guardian, Pitchfork and The Globe & Mail. His bestselling debut novel, Us Conductors, winner of the Scotiabank Giller Prize, was named one of NPR’s best books of the year.

Editorial Reviews

11/04/2019

Luck (and the lack of it) is the subject of this quirky work from Michaels (Us Conductors). At 36, Theo Potiris is a struggling stand-up comedian, despite one appearance on Conan. He works in his parents’ grocery store and plays the local comedy clubs on open-mic nights. Then, one day, he takes his 13-year-old niece, Hanna, to the track, where she wins $4 million on her first pick. This rocks Theo’s world to the point where he quits his job in favor of employment with the Rabbit Foot, a consortium of scientists who are attempting to quantify luck and monetize it. Then, he meets a woman named Simone who recruits him for the No Name Gang, which attempts to steal luck from those who hoard it. As part of this gang, Theo helps hijack luck from novelist Daniel Merrett Leys, author of The Labrador Sea, and billionaire businessman Z. Largo, with ever increasing risk of arrest or betrayal. What starts out as a fairly realistic drama eventually morphs into a surreal caper, with luck as an actual commodity to be prized—though to what end is never made entirely clear by the author. Some readers will be overwhelmed by the whimsy of the story, while others will enjoy Michaels’s unflagging imagination. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

"This novel is like a literary fireworks display . . . I had more fun reading this book than I have with any other novel for a very long time."

The Globe & Mail

"If you’re the kind of person for whom a fondness for crime stories abuts a penchant for the uncanny, well, you might just have your new favorite read."

Vol 1 Brooklyn

"In this delightfully protean tale that shifts among many styles, Michaels queries and pushes against our obsession with quantifying all experience as analyzable data. A wistful and wondrously inventive novel."

Booklist

2019-10-27
A quiet part-time comedian leaves his family grocery business to try his luck at what turn out to be two bizarre pursuits in this thoughtful, offbeat novel.

Every Friday, Theo Potiris goes to the racetrack and places a bet to see how his luck is holding before deciding whether or not he should take the stand-up stage or go home to his apartment above his family's old supermarket, Provisions K. This unprepossessing Greek Jewish Quebecois on the brink of middle age is the protagonist of Michaels' (Us Conductors, 2014) second novel. With his girlfriend, Lou, on a retreat in a distant desert, Theo emerges from his cocoon into two odd worlds of adventure. Prompted by his mother's death and his young niece's massive win while under his care at the racetrack, Theo finds his gateway to novelty is a trio of Italian French-Canadian sisters and a weather-obsessed statistician named Matisse. Matisse works for one of the sisters, who has built up an empire founded on a computer algorithm that makes money betting that it can predict the future better than the bookies. After a short spell working with them, Theo leaves to join the other two sisters, who are part of a criminal gang that steals luck worldwide. Luck looks like and is forensically indistinguishable from sand but makes the owner lucky. Despite these characters of slippery panglobal provenance, a paranoid millionaire, a mysterious billionaire, and some thrilling action in Taiwan, Michaels maintains a calm, quiet tone for Theo that's "neither panicky nor proud." Theo mentions the work of Paul Auster, and this book feels like an homage to The Music of Chance—with its strange biographical tangents and theme of fortune. We see glimpses of the comedy, but sadly, though Michaels was himself an occasional onstage comedian, we never quite see the philosophical insight he claims for Theo's comedy. Our hero is, in the end, inscrutable in ways that are psychologically convincing but narratively unsatisfying.

Constantly fascinating but never quite remarkable.

Kirkus Reviews