'Wall and Mean' ,etc (ZT)

Novelists Take to Wall Street
by John C. Boland
Friday, July 6, 2007provided byWSJ


You would think that after 70 years of securities regulation, reptile-brained Wall Streeters would have learned to behave. Fortunately, they haven't, if we're to believe recent novelists who find the Street still rocking to greed, sex and drugs. If only one of these writers had added, for balance, a cameo of alpha-regulators Rudy Giuliani and Eliot Spitzer behaving badly. Maybe in a sequel.

Tom Bernard's debut thriller, "Wall and Mean" (Norton, 255 pages, $24.95), is the least ambitious of the four of books under consideration here but not without its rewards. A straightforward crime story, it opens with high drama on a trading desk as hedgies blow out emerging-country debt during the Russian constitutional crisis of 1993. Tanks in Moscow fire on Parliament, bids vanish. George Wilhelm, a relatively new boy at City Trust, has the nerve to buy when blood is in the streets, a likable quality in any Wall Street hero. But he also bets the spread on sports games, a habit that balloons into a week of mad addiction.

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But what's a quarter-million owed to a bookie when you've got a big bonus coming in February? George gets a quick answer: He needs to come up with 25 big ones every week in interest. If he misses a payment, he'll get hauled out to the "Spa" for discipline by Frank and Kevin, two menacing enforcers who speak a kind of post-Puzo Brooklynese. After an interest payment or two, George knows that he is about tapped out. If City Trust learns of his gambling problem, he's finished there -- sans bonus. Such is the crossroads dilemma of "Wall and Mean."

In desperation, George turns to a friend's drug dealer, who used to trade bonds before doing time at the Danbury federal pen, and the two devise a nifty scheme to have City Trust buy obscure Nicaraguan debt for a few points' markup. They'll skim a half-million from the bank. The bookie will get paid. George will be alive to collect his bonus. That's the plan. The Brooklyn boys, having gotten a taste of bank skimming, have other ideas.

Mr. Bernard's résumé includes stretches at Salomon and Lehman, but none at Danbury. Still, his depiction of criminal doings is as convincing as his account of trading-desk shenanigans. In two senses, perhaps, he is a writer to watch.

"Das Kapital" (Simon & Schuster, 175 pages, $23), the second novel by Viken Berberian ("The Cyclist" appeared in 2002), offers a scheme that sounds better than it reads. Wayne, a hedge-fund guy expecting a market apocalypse, tries to speed it along by allying himself with an eco-terrorist known as the Corsican. Wayne sells short. The Corsican stages spectacles (bombs exploding, buildings collapsing). Prices plunge. Wayne screams in pleasure. At other times Wayne screams in rage. A leitmotif in the novel is his frustration over not being able to get an avocado sandwich that includes avocado.

An intermediary named Alix, for instance, travels from Marseilles to consummate her text-messaging flirtation with Wayne. They meet at the chic restaurant Balthazar in New York, and we learn perhaps more than we want to know about literary fiction: "She was excited when he ordered snails. Her cultural receptors had been conditioned to champion the terrestrial gastropods from an early age.... Then he smiled and it was the last piece of evidence she needed: the perfect man with perfect teeth with durable dentin and enamel.... The angulation of his teeth was perfect. In a moment of openness he shared with her the toothpaste he used. It was Mavis, imported from Italy."

In the course of telling his story, Mr. Berberian anoints Nassim Taleb ("The Black Swan") and Alan Abelson of Barron's as "good guys," and, lo and behold, in the publisher's press release Mr. Taleb blurbs the book. (Note to Promo Dept.: Did we ever get in touch with Abelson?) Mr. Berberian displays a good deal of authentic cleverness in "Das Kapital," alongside perhaps too much erudition. One footnote reads: "The ratios of successive Fibonacci numbers approach the golden ratio as n approaches infinity."

The story may be about "the end of Western hegemony, if not of dialectical history." Or not. Did I mention it's a literary novel? The dust jacket includes the information that Mr. Berberian's earlier "prose gumbo is redolent of Nabokov," quoting the lit-scholars at Entertainment Weekly with no trace of Nabokovian, or even Berberianist, drollery.

"Confessions of a Wall Street Shoeshine Boy" (HarperCollins, 290 pages, $24.95), a first novel by a Vanity Fair editor, Doug Stumpf, describes the adventures of Gil, a hip-talking young Brazilian who puts the gloss on downtown traders' Guccis. As he goes about his lowly business, he trips over insider trading and extortion, passing the dirt along to a scribe for Glossy magazine, who banks on an exposé to rescue his career.

Mr. Stumpf tries for a sassy, picaresque tale, but the Wall Street characters are never developed beyond greedy meanies, and the mischief is too familiar. As for insights, Gil, in his street lingo, offers of his clients: "But they only about money. They live in a kind of fake world." Jeez.

If Holden Caulfield had stuck it out at a good school and landed on Wall Street, he might have written "Mergers & Acquisitions" (Riverhead, 290 pages, $23.95). "Who" -- 28-year-old author Dana Vachon might ask -- "is Holden Caulfield?" Never mind. Mr. Vachon's book is a profane, smartly written, largely unsentimental coming-of-age story. It's funny, too, mostly for reasons that can't be described here. Tommy Quinn, an undistinguished Georgetown student, is hired as an analyst trainee at J.S. Spenser & Co. and sets about proving that utter incompetence doesn't guarantee a career. Meanwhile, Tommy's friend Roger Thorne floats upward with 0.00 correlation between ability and consequence. He "like, dudes" his way through sex goddesses, mere babes, drugs, porno-video, Mexican pirates and half-billion-dollar deals that bear his name but fortunately not his input.

Mr. Vachon is a skilled scene-builder, with an ear for absurdity. Sometimes it's not Holden Caulfield's take on Wall Street that he offers but Bart Simpson's. Both work. The big questions for which Mr. Vachon reaches sound familiar as soon as they're posed: God having failed, late-American man is adrift. What's a dude to think? Mr. Vachon's attempt at an answer, if I've understood it, rings a false note. Stigmata -- really?

But that's OK. If there were a sensible answer, young men wouldn't need to write coming-of-age novels and that would be a pity. "Mergers & Acquisitions" is a treat. In the author's terms: It rocks.

Mr. Boland has written a half-dozen financial mysteries.