This is an economic romance. It is determined to introduce us to the benefits of unfettered capitalism via the heart-warming story of Sam Gordon and Laura Silver. Our heroes are teachers at an elitist private school in Washington DC. Gordon is an economics teacher and a passionate espouser of the tenets of Adam Smith, Friedman et al. Silver is the "naive" English teacher in love with poetry and full of noble, but, as Gordon would have it, woolly-headed liberal idealism.
Their burgeoning relationship is explored against a backdrop of corporate malpractice.
This concerns Charles Krauss, the vicious and greedy head of pharmaceutical giant HealthNet, who is not afraid to destroy lives or even murder to maintain his and his company's position at the top of the food chain.
In the other corner we have ferocious but gorgeous Erica Baldwin; chief of the Office of Corporate Responsibility, who knows that gaining Krauss's scalp would put her underfunded outfit on the map.
In an interesting dramatic device, we only learn halfway through the book that this is in fact fictional and I must admit to disappointment as I was cheering for Baldwin.
Roberts uses a putative TV show starring Michael Douglas as Krauss and Nicole Kidman as Baldwin to illustrate two of his pet points: that popular entertainment gives capitalism a bad press and that denying one's true principles is self-defeating.
What we get in the main story is the slaying of the great leftwing dragons by the doughty St George of classical liberal economics. Social welfare, environmental protection, government regulation of the market, why teachers are paid less than sport stars and trade unionism are all trounced as Gordon woos Silver.
He gets all the best lines, able to call on the compelling arguments of Smith, Friedman and Von Hayek, while all that Silver has in response is a few lines from the likes of Tennyson and her good intentions. Indeed the title of the book comes from Gordon's belief that "Capitalism involves struggle, but it has an invisible heart beating at its core that transforms peoples lives, if you give it a chance", which in itself is a take on Adam Smith's famous "invisible hand" line.
What one is crying out for is for Silver to put away her poets and take a crash course in Marx, Marcuse or the Great Depression in order to argue with Gordon. As far as the romance element goes, Gordon and Silver's courtship is modelled on those Rock Hudson/Doris Day movies but not as raunchy. Roberts wears his, ahem, heart on his sleeve and his bite-sized chunks of economics are easily digestible. He thoughtfully provides sources and further reading at the back and his writing style is likeable.
All we need to balance the equation if for somebody to write Sex And The Socialist or even How I Stopped Worrying And Learned To Love Dialectical Materialism.
comidheach@irish-times.ie
