The Burning

Writing about gambling, chance and fate, Legendre takes a bold risk, wagering an enjoyable if predictable bloke-lit debut against the egghead novel of ideas that it becomes—and he pulls it off. Fresh out of graduate school, economist Logan Smith joins a couple of friends for a weekend in Las Vegas, where he falls for troubled, needy blackjack dealer Dallas Cole. A few months later, Logan is a professor at Arizona State University, and Dallas is his uneasy new wife. Moving from the trials of a marriage's first year to the rarified world of academia, Legendre makes Logan's life of the mind every bit as stimulating as the human drama that surrounds it, providing Logan's neo-Marxist theories with resonance and real stakes. Legendre's fully realized characters, longing for something other than what they have—other lovers, other careers, other political realities—render vividly the weight of American yearning. (July)