Successful prose fiction weaves together the fabric of true-to-life experience with the artificial fiber of created characters and synthesized plot lines. The final “quilt” is seamless; you can’t tell which are the real fibers and which are the synthetic ones. This quilt is stronger and more form fitting than the literal truth. It provides us with a lesson, a moral, a path to our own future.
With the American economy still in trouble, and the jobless future still appearing quite bleak, now is the time to look back over the past decade through the probing truth-telling eyes of prose fiction. Douglas Brunt, first time novelist, is a persuasive storyteller, and one story that was important to the collapse of our speculation and deception-ridden economy was failed bailout and ultimate demise of Bear Stearns in 2008. Brunt details a personal world of opulence and excess which the traders and sellers entered when they signed up for duty at Bear Stearns. Whether this rendering is entirely realistic or just one window into a larger reality, it is a compelling read. Our guide to this world is Nick Farmer, a seasoned bond trader who like so many others has sacrificed his youth and his dreams for the million dollar bonuses and the over-specialized non-transferable skills of Wall Street.
But Farmer isn’t just another soulless sellout – he has heart and it turns out he has courage. As we follow him through a Celinesque world of hallucinatory Wall Street decadence and depravity we find ourselves rooting for his final chance for escape. In the process we witness bathroom cocaine, endless alcohol binges, and hookers and strippers who submit to sado-masochistic tryts which tragically border on rape.
Farmer is more or less on the periphery of this brutality, more of a witness than a participant, but it is clear he wasn’t simply signing on to a computer screen when he took the job at Bear, he was agreeing to a mentally and physically corrosive lifestyle that was the ultimate undoing of the individual and may have contributed to the cumulative undoing of our economy. After more than a decade of exposure to this life, Farmer not only feels trapped, but he is in danger of losing both his marriage and his sanity. It is amazing that he is still in a position where he can still save both.
Brunt describes not just the psychological but also the physical effects of years of excess drinking. Jack Wilson is an associate who runs the trading desk at Chappy, a top brokerage shop. “He’s about five seven, average build, but his face and neck are swollen from alchohol. The way cookie dough flattens when baked, his features have melted down to be almost flat and unrecognizable. There is enough left to see that it had once been a good-looking face.”
Jack ends up having a heart attack, probably brought on by alcohol and cocaine, and literally collapses in Nick’s arms, near death.
Jack’s destruction motivates Nick in his struggle to regain his moral compass before its too late, to resist the temptress who is the final threat to his marriage, to quit before he is sucked irretrievably to the center of the vortex.
Reading The Ghosts of Manhattan, it is easy to understand how the worst of Wall Street came apart. But in Nick’s determination to escape his own inevitable destruction we are uplifted and find renewed hope for a cleaned-up world without Bear Stearns.
Unfortunately, plucking out one large weed didn’t mean that others wouldn’t immediately grow in to take its place.
With the American economy still in trouble, and the jobless future still appearing quite bleak, now is the time to look back over the past decade through the probing truth-telling eyes of prose fiction. Douglas Brunt, first time novelist, is a persuasive storyteller, and one story that was important to the collapse of our speculation and deception-ridden economy was failed bailout and ultimate demise of Bear Stearns in 2008. Brunt details a personal world of opulence and excess which the traders and sellers entered when they signed up for duty at Bear Stearns. Whether this rendering is entirely realistic or just one window into a larger reality, it is a compelling read. Our guide to this world is Nick Farmer, a seasoned bond trader who like so many others has sacrificed his youth and his dreams for the million dollar bonuses and the over-specialized non-transferable skills of Wall Street.
But Farmer isn’t just another soulless sellout – he has heart and it turns out he has courage. As we follow him through a Celinesque world of hallucinatory Wall Street decadence and depravity we find ourselves rooting for his final chance for escape. In the process we witness bathroom cocaine, endless alcohol binges, and hookers and strippers who submit to sado-masochistic tryts which tragically border on rape.
Farmer is more or less on the periphery of this brutality, more of a witness than a participant, but it is clear he wasn’t simply signing on to a computer screen when he took the job at Bear, he was agreeing to a mentally and physically corrosive lifestyle that was the ultimate undoing of the individual and may have contributed to the cumulative undoing of our economy. After more than a decade of exposure to this life, Farmer not only feels trapped, but he is in danger of losing both his marriage and his sanity. It is amazing that he is still in a position where he can still save both.
Brunt describes not just the psychological but also the physical effects of years of excess drinking. Jack Wilson is an associate who runs the trading desk at Chappy, a top brokerage shop. “He’s about five seven, average build, but his face and neck are swollen from alchohol. The way cookie dough flattens when baked, his features have melted down to be almost flat and unrecognizable. There is enough left to see that it had once been a good-looking face.”
Jack ends up having a heart attack, probably brought on by alcohol and cocaine, and literally collapses in Nick’s arms, near death.
Jack’s destruction motivates Nick in his struggle to regain his moral compass before its too late, to resist the temptress who is the final threat to his marriage, to quit before he is sucked irretrievably to the center of the vortex.
Reading The Ghosts of Manhattan, it is easy to understand how the worst of Wall Street came apart. But in Nick’s determination to escape his own inevitable destruction we are uplifted and find renewed hope for a cleaned-up world without Bear Stearns.
Unfortunately, plucking out one large weed didn’t mean that others wouldn’t immediately grow in to take its place.
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