Review: Cooperative Lives by Patrick Finegan

A swirl of characters centers around a dying young girl in New York City, each with their own burdens as they try to get through another day living in their ever-changing worlds. Cooperative Lives by Patrick Finegan underscores how lives intersect, crash into each other, and then reveal the secrets that people carry, and sometimes expose.

Jack and Susan seem to be living a broken yet plausible existence in their quintessential New York building, an aging co-op with doormen and supercilious board members. Jack’s an out-of-work securities lawyer and his wife, Susan, a former flight attendant and barely a survivor of an accident and botched surgery. They keep up appearances but it’s straining, yet at least they aren’t suffering the same fate as their neighbors Wallace and Hanni who lost their daughter Alya to leukemia.

Wally and Hanni spent days at their daughter’s bedside, where the mysterious Hanni used a variety of influence to help her daughter. Wally oversees IT there and uncovers a plot involving national security and fraud. His diligence lands him in hot water after his daughter dies and his wife leaves, but what does he have to lose as he barrels toward the truth?

As Wallace’s troubles wax and wane, Jack’s helping of a neighbor gives suspicions to a doctor who is connected to Susan’s botched surgery. In the meantime, Jack’s situation makes him appear desperate to authorities. Where will that lead, and which characters will he cross paths with along the way?

Set inside a post 9-11 New York City, the sadness and distrust of these characters rise off the page. Freedom, once treasured, has not been replaced by security, Finegan is saying. Instead, Cooperative Lives peels back the layers to reveal a New York City that still hurts from its wounds, and characters that live each day under the haunting banner of the Patriot Act.

Finegan gives each character, however minor, heft, with backstories and quirks that deepen the plot, as well as exploring varying facets of the human condition. There are weak-willed mommy pleasers and exotic, possible spies who use sex as a weapon. There’s a parsimonious and goodhearted widower, and a jaded homeland security officer. There’s the now-solitary Wally, whose life has been turned upside down, but that just might lead him to a deeper truth. And there’s main character Jack – all roads point to his goodness, but what is he really capable of?

Finegan is a gifted wordsmith, crafting sentences that are rich and multilayered, which propels the story along beyond the intricacies of the plot. The story is overly tangential at times, but it never goes so far afield that the story’s core intrigue is not at the forefront, taking the reader on a mysterious journey that weaves together the flawed lives of the novel’s many characters.

Despite the meandering nature of some of the narrative, this is more than made up for by the richness of the characters, the deftness of the prose, and the story’s central mystery. A rare work of literary fiction that also shines as a mystery and a thriller, Cooperative Lives offers a brilliant exposé on the shattered nature of modern lives.