Pollen

by Patrick W. Gallagher

When the right-wing social movement known as "I Trust My Boss" collapses and takes the economy down with it, it's up to Columbia University German-lit PhD students, Radhika and Bradley, to create a false simulacrum of fictional capitalism by inflating a financial bubble in "Memoirist-Backed Securities" (MBS). Radhika takes over the publishing industry's leading agency in securitized literature, PolyAgency, and Bradley uses memories stolen from his friend Pete--who Bradley has shot and killed out of pure resentment--to become critically acclaimed as the "number-one memoirist" in the entire world. Bradley's girlfriend Karen launders enough money from sales of "pollen"--a drug manufactured clandestinely by the government, to control the minds of U.S. troops stationed overseas--to keep PolyAgency afloat even when Radhika's bubble-inflating success provokes the violent jealousy of Wall Street's dominant banks.

It looks like the coast is clear, or is it? Bradley needs to finish "his" "memoir" before the forces watching his every move learn his terrible secret. Radhika's jealousy over her girlfriend's affair with a PolyAgency partner makes her homicidally paranoid. Karen seizes Columbia's endowment for use in a scheme so radical and so risky that it puts everything in the balance. Can our heroes triumph over their rivals, or will they destroy themselves through repeated, cataclysmic acts of self-sabotage? The answer lies in Pollen, a comic romp through the self-destruction of all that is good and decent in the world.

532 pages, Kindle Edition

Published February 14, 2016