The Invisible Hand

Cole entwines the lives of three lost characters in this serpentine literary novel.

Sara has lived alone with her father since her mother died; on the day he is sent to prison, she sets fire to their house in Houston and boards a Greyhound to San Diego. On the bus, she meets Jack, a man with a checkered employment history who has recently witnessed a murder during a probably illegal business deal in Mexico. He convinces Sara to disembark early with him and meet his friends at the hotel where he lives—a gang of unscrupulous characters with names like T-Bear and Piston who have a lot of paranoid ideas about money and power—and they offer Sara a warning that Jack may not be the kind of man she thinks he is. 

Meanwhile, Gabriel High Bear tries to be a good Christian boy (he receives a wooden cross at church for singing in the choir) even as he befriends the “Detention King” at his school. When one of his friends is killed while the boys are horsing around near the train tracks, Gabriel fears he’s doomed himself to a new life as a “bad kid.” 

Finally, there’s Jones, a hard-drinking financial adviser known for his almost mystical abilities to make his elderly clients money. “His job was to cultivate relationships, to be in the right place at the right time, to troll the culture for its active energy spots and then to siphon off the overlooked abscess here and there and charge them with his own kind of magic.” When his drinking starts to lose him clients, however, his life runs the risk of falling apart. Jumping between the stories of these three protagonists, Cole paints a dark portrait of the ways in which people slip out of society and the struggles they face to get back in.