Christopher Beha is a smart guy and a talented novelist, but I just got tired of him talking about his characters' bodily functions. Life is too short to waste any more time reading this book. ( )

In our lifetimes, each and every one of us has committed a self-destructive act. In fact, in all probability, we’ve committed many. Too many to count, in fact.
A self-destructive act is an action a person takes which irrevocably alters his life. Some acts are simple carelessness or even more innocent accidents: leaving a kettle on the flames, backing up the car too rapidly, putting your hand into boiling water. Others are actions that seemed OK at the time but later turned out very badly. Some acts have immediate consequences, others fester for years before finally coming home to roust.
Christopher Beha’s novel covers most of these kinds of acts. People who are neither good nor bad do things that destroy their lives and sometimes the lives of others. They were not intentional harms delivered from malice, simply acts that were perhaps out of character yet had lasting and serious impacts. For example, in this book, a minor character named Justin does something he knows is unethical to help an old friend, yet intention does not matter; the result does. But this act of generous good intent comes after years of much more selfishly motivated destructive acts.
The Index of Self-Destructive Acts includes a cast of characters whose actions have significant negative consequences, usually upon both themselves and upon others.
The story begins by introducing a self-aggrandizing, character whose smug self-centeredness later leads to his own self-destruction, but not until he interacts with numerous other characters who each engage in self-destructive behaviors of their own.
The writer, Sam Waxman, achieves fame by correctly forecasting the outcomes of elections with unerring accuracy. His success leads him to be offered a job in New York City, half a country away from his home in Madison, Wisconsin. He ignores the interests of his wife, Lucy, accepts the job, and takes himself to New York. Lucy stays behind.
The offer comes from a famous and renowned magazine which for 160 years has had the full trust of its reading public.
Sam is assigned to interview a writer who had been legendary among baseball fans until he committed his own self-destructive act. He made racist remarks on national TV when he was intoxicated. The baseball writer, Frank Doyle, is an alcoholic and the husband of a wealthy wife whose family has gained wealth through its investment strategies. They have a daughter, Margo, and son, Edward, who also figure prominently in the story and who each commit their own acts of self-destruction.
The plot is long, and involved, but is an insightful look into the psychology of human beings and how that psychology governs our lives.
Good novels often revolve around human psychology and its impact, and this novel certainly falls into the company of other good novels whose fictional characters tell us so much about ourselves and about our own behaviors.
The Index of Self-Destructive Acts presents few likable characters, making it perhaps less enjoyable than people who rate books based on how much they like them would want. But for people who look for more substance in a novel, this is a good place to go. ( )

In her review Roxane Gay called this a "messy sprawl of a novel" and that feels accurate. It is also pretty great. Our characters are in a constant state of building, burning down, and rebuilding their lives. Everyone is thwarted by passion, and (differently but no less profoundly) thwarted by denial of passion. Everyone is making huge mistakes that are causing serious damage to their well-being. Everyone has their own index of self-destructive acts.

The book is totally absorbing, beautifully written, an old fashioned epic - and I use the term "old-fashioned" in the very best way. Modern books are so "me" oriented, they tend to turn an ordinary character, or perhaps two characters, inside out. I like a lot of those books, but I miss stories of interrelationship on a slightly grander scale. There are so many moving parts here, and so many different ways of self-destructing. Still most of these characters' stories, and their connections to one another, come together brilliantly. There are a few very farfetched "convenient" meetings or incidences of missed events/information (particularly in the last 75 pages), but not so many that they diminished my overall enjoyment.

For the most part, even the jerks in the story are endearing. Sam is such a bumbling imperious man-child. I would despise him in real life, and god knows I did not root for him in the book, but i also loved him and I hope his future (were he to have one off the page) is filled with self-actualization and other good things. Frank is also an imperious man-child, but an older one, more certain he knows everything in the world than even Sam. Frank is also far less grateful for the gifts that have been bestowed upon him by the universe. He plays at being an iconoclast, but is in fact obsessed with what people think about him, so obsessed that once people censure him in any way they cease to exist for him. Still, I was fond of him in the way that I am fond of Philip Roth's Nathan Zuckerman. It is hard to hate smart funny people whom the world has told they are the center of the universe, and who have taken that quite literally.

There is one central character who was problematic for me, and that is Kit. She comes off like some chic UES giving tree. No one who has ever run an investment bank makes decisions the way she does. I found her completely unconvincing, I am pretty sure Beha knows less about the world of finance than about journalism, higher ed, publishing, and baseball. Kit's story was more jarring than it might otherwise have been because the book's other characters' lives existed in those other realms and they felt real, felt like people I have known. Kit is such an important part of the book that I took a star for that. This was a high 4. A pure escape into a complicated messy group of people in a world that eschews the life-giving beauty of surprises and things inexplicable in favor of the false certainty of statistical analysis. This is a world that does not allow its celebrities or demi-celebrities a single error. preferring to see the world in black and white. exalting at the fleeting pleasure of burning people at the stake rather than the subtle long-term pleasure of a redemption arc. I guess it is a world that has taken the "sweet science" and turned it into plain old science. It makes for a story that is very modern, and also nostalgic in a way that doesn't make me want to vomit (I am not a nostalgic person at all, but I miss the hell out of uncertainty and second chances.) A great read. ( )

This is not usually my cup of tea but for some reason, found a review fascinating so tried it with the idea that I would just "try" and not force myself to finish if I didn't want to. I had no trouble finishing it. The characters are all on their way to self-destruct, but there isn't a lot of the "internal whining" that so often is found in contemporary fiction.

Frank Doyle is a "celebrity" writer, political and sports analyst who has just disgraced himself with racist remarks during a major ball game broadcast. His wife is the head of a financial house on Wall Street. One son, Eddie, has just returned from a tour in Iraq and the daughter, Margot, is attempting to find herself as a poet. Sam Waxworth is a young star of "statistics" on the Internet having just made some major predictions. He is recently married to Lucy who remains in Wisconsin while he is recently hired in NYC. One of Sam's first assignments is to interview Frank - his exact opposite whom he is sure to mislike. That interview leads to Sam's relationship with Margot. Meanwhile, Frank is slipping fast into a sort of dementia, his wife, Kit, finds herself mixed up with some insider trading leading to other problems. Eddie takes up with an old man who is a street corner preacher predicting the end of the world.

All the characters do what they think is reasonable at the time but often just digging themselves deeper in trouble. There is quite a bit of baseball lore and financial jargon which I'm not all that attuned to, but overall the book was a good read and I felt the characters were believable. However, there were just one or two "circumstances" which seemed a stretch at the ending: Eddie taking a call as an EMT to an old man on the street which is Frank and a "random" sighting of people on the busy streets of NYC.

Overall good read. Liked the author's style. ( )

For the most part, the book was OK. I think the general plot was the only thing getting me to finish the book. I really only liked Lucy's arch. I like Beha's take on a love triangle/affair story. It was probably the only story line that I thought really made sense.
The weakest parts are when Beha tries to make his characters speak for more than a few sentences. Be it Waxworth or Frank, they're thoughts on baseball/stats/etc...were tired. Plus, the trope of a numbers guy being basically devoid of feeling is lazy. Also, how creative that the writer is an alcoholic!
The plot takes place in NYC, but it didn't really add to anything. Might as well have been in Boston or Connecticut. They talk of Madison, but didn't really capture much of Madison besides Lucy's parents being open-minded liberals. Baseball makes an appearance in the book, for no real reason. The element of financial crimes didn't really add to anything, and the sting operation for insider trading doesn't seem realistic to me.
For Beha being an editor, it was kind of disappointing to see two obvious typos (six feet six inches, "the" instead of "they"). But that is forgivable. But as an employee of MLB, former trader, Badger, and math major, I felt no real connection to this book.
The writing was very good, and the plot kept going. But the book kind of flopped, much liked everybody's lives (except Lucy, go Lucy) in this story. ( )