The Index of Self-Destructive Acts: A Novel
About this audiobook
A novel about belief—in a game, a job, a way of life, a family—and the unexpected ways we rely on each other when our most important realities crumble
The day Sam Waxworth arrives in New York to write for The Interviewer, a street-corner preacher declares that the world is coming to an end. A sports statistician, data journalist, and newly minted media celebrity who correctly forecasted every outcome of the 2008 election, Sam’s familiar with predicting the future. But when projection meets reality, things turn complicated.
Sam’s editor sends him to profile disgraced political columnist Frank Doyle. To most readers, Doyle is a liberal lion turned neocon Iraq war apologist, but to Sam he is above all the author of the great works of baseball lore that sparked Sam’s childhood love of the game—books he now views as childish myth-making to be crushed with his empirical hammer. But Doyle proves something else in person: charming, intelligent, and more convincing than Sam could have expected. Then there is his daughter, Margo, to whom Sam becomes desperately attracted—just as his wife, Lucy, arrives from Wisconsin.
The lives of these characters are entwined with those of the rest of the Doyle family—Frank’s wife, Kit, whose investment bank collapsed during the financial crisis; his son, Eddie, an Army veteran just returned from his second combat tour; and Eddie’s best childhood friend, hedge funder Justin Price. While the end of the world might not be arriving, Beha’s characters are each headed for apocalypses of their own making.
About the author
Christopher Beha is the editor of Harper’s Magazine. He is the author of two previous novels, What Happened to Sophie Wilder and Arts & Entertainments, and a memoir, The Whole Five Feet. His writing has appeared in the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, and the London Review of Books. He lives in New York City with his wife and family.
Jim Frangione has narrated over 350 audiobooks, including all of J. R. Ward's Black Dagger Brotherhood series. Other favorites: The Chet and Bernie Mysteries, by Spencer Quinn, Dennis Lehane's Live By Night, The Drop, and World Gone By; Anton Chekhov's Fifty-Two Stories, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, Ben Tarnoff's The Bohemians, and most recently Philip Caputo's The Voyage. He's received over a dozen AudioFile Earphones Awards and was named one of Audible's Best Voices of 2016. He has narrated five books that AudioFile magazine selected as the Best Audiobooks of the Year: World Gone By (2015), Dark Carousel (2016), The Chosen and Lucy and Desi (both 2017), and J. R. Ward's The Sinner (2020). Jim is artistic director of Great Barrington Public Theater, a professional summer theater that develops and produces new plays for the stage.
