Nice things people said:

“There’s a line in this capacious, deeply satisfying, and riotous novel about how the U.S. ‘has skipped smilingly through history.’ Well, that’s been my experience reading through this story about the adventures, crossing the wide world, of Roberto and Rachel Costa. Wilton Barnhardt’s novel belongs on the first shelf of our grown-up pleasures. Don’t miss it.” — RICHARD BAUSCH (Playhouse: A Novel, Living in the Weather of the World)

“Wilton Barnhardt’s ‘Western Alliances’ begins with the financial crash of 2008. Sal Costa is a CNBC television personality and the newly named CEO of a tottering brokerage firm: He is widely considered one of the last honest men on Wall Street. Sal is determined to save his company, but that means cutting off funds to his cosseted family while the SEC freezes the firm’s accounts. His daughter’s response is to dig up dirt in an attempt at extortion. But his devoted son, Roberto, whose temperament is more poetic, takes the news gracefully and decides to bide the time by couch-surfing across Europe, recording his impressions in a journal he hopes will make him famous. The novel is framed as Roberto’s travelogue, complete with tourist photos… So while his travels from Madrid to Moscow take him into the bedrooms of a variety of interesting companions, both male and female, the interactions tend to be tame, more dedicated to heady conversations and heart-to-hearts. His peregrinations are effortlessly engaging until [some dramatic turns] late in the book, which suggest that even for the most well-intentioned family there is no such thing as untainted money. The reading pleasures become guiltier at this point, yet Mr. Barnhardt writes with so much wit and sophistication that I kept on enjoying Roberto’s adventures in the Old World, whether I was entirely meant to or not.” — Sam Sacks, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

“Whom can a trust-fund baby trust, especially once the trust fund runs out? That’s the question plaguing Roberto, son of cable-TV financial guru Sal Costa. He obviously can’t trust his equally avaricious sister, Rachel, nor their hypochondriac mother, Sal’s ex, Lena. And given his penchant for antiquities and art history, probably no one in the Eurotrash circles he frequents, either. When the financial upheaval of 2008 threatens to cut off virtually all their funding, Roberto, Rachel, and Lena become mired in the very high stakes game of one-upmanship required to master myriad legal wranglings necessary to continue living large. Reduced to cadging couches from whatever ex-lover or new romance will have him, Roberto nevertheless continues his dilettante’s tour of the continent… Fans of HBO’s Succession will be attracted to the backstabbing and debauchery on gaudy display in Barnhardt’s campy, steamy social satire.” — Carol Haggas, BOOKLIST

“An appealing hybrid of travelogue, dilettante’s diary, family saga, exposé of the new international Capitalism of the Oligarchs, and the bedpost-notching of a sexual swashbuckler—set against the backdrop of the Wall Street collapse of 2008.
        Roberto Costa has never had to work. Son of Salvador, a Providence bond trader–turned–CNBC talking head–turned, lately, investment bank CEO, Bobby drifts through Europe, in parallel and in competition with his feckless sister, Rachel. He is a charmer, a gifted linguist, tall and handsome in addition to rich, and he bounces from city to city, conquest to conquest, taking notes for an always-in-its-early-stages magnum opus he sees as part Pepys, part Sebald, part guide to comparative linguistics. Bobby and Rachel are gluttons for all things old European, and they have a spirited rivalry when it comes to collecting places and relics, especially Romanesque architecture. Both are circled by hangers-on, users; chief among these is their shameless, amusing con woman mother, who’s long since moved on from Salvador but not from the pursuit of his assets. The novel is lightly but deftly plotted; most of its joys have to do with bantering dialogue and with what Bobby calls his “Notebooks” project. His observations about history, culture, and especially language are great fun, and Barnhardt also excels, in the son’s affectionate interactions with his father, at illustrating and glossing the 2008 crisis and the greed and skulduggery that caused it…
        A likable, smart, wide-ranging ramble, good fun for those who like novels not aimless but a little aim-resistant.” — KIRKUS

“Barnhardt (Lookaway, Lookaway) creates a biting and hilarious indictment of generational wealth and its effects. Any fiction reader would enjoy.” — LIBRARY JOURNAL