There's not a single main character in Union Atlantic; the novel follows the intersection of three confused people living in a small Massachusetts town: Doug Fanning, a Gulf War veteran and hotshot banker; Charlotte Graves, a retired teacher who's slowly losing her grasp on reality; and Nate Fuller, a gay teenage stoner dealing with the recent suicide of his father. Fanning works in Boston, but builds a tacky, palatial house in the town of Finden, near where he grew up. Graves lives next door -- her family had donated the preserve that Fanning had razed to build the house. Fuller, in danger of failing high school, has hired Graves as a history tutor, and befriends -- kind of -- Fanning, after the student sneaks into his house to look around...It's probably inevitable that Haslett's book will be cast as the first great American novel about the financial collapse of the banking industry. It's not. It is great, to be sure, but Haslett hasn't written a novelization of the nation's most recent economic debacle; this is, at its heart, a book about people...It's been years since a novel has captured the zeitgeist of contemporary America this well; it's been years since a new author has convinced us, with just two books, that there might be nothing he can't do. – Reviewed in Bookslut