The Draw

A Publishers Weekly Book of the WeekThe Draw is a coming-of-age story about a boy striving to make his way up through society and out of a family that has been emotionally and psychologically devastated by economic misfortune. Lee Siegel's father, Monroe, a kind and decent man, accumulates a crushing debt to the company he works for, a real estate firm that has been paying him an advance, or "draw," against future commissions. "The more he depended on the Draw to live," Lee writes of his father, "the more it shrank his life." As the recession hits in the mid- 1970s, Monroe finds himself without commissions, and thus unable to pay back his employer. Fired from his job, he is pursued by the law, loses his wife to divorce, and eventually declares bankruptcy. Lee's mother, Lola, confronting a bleak and tenuous future, experiences a breakdown that transforms her into a seductive yet vindictive adversary of Lee, her older...