 Book Reviews
with Robin Osborne
American Sucker
By David Denby
Text $28
 A long-time contributor to The New Yorker and notable film critic David Denby attained literary prominence with Great Books, a first-class piece of intellectual voyeurism about returning, in 1991 at the age of 48, to study at Columbia University where he had graduated more than two decades earlier.
The book sold like hot cakes and has been re-released for his visit to the upcoming Melbourne Writers Festival.
But all was not well in the house of Denby, and at the beginning of 2000 his wife Cathy announced that she wanted to end the relationship and move in with her new lover - a woman, although that is not made explicitly clear.
The author began a re-evaluation of his life, focused on maintaining contact with their two adolescent sons and making enough money to buy out his wife's share of their Manhattan apartment, a nice piece of real estate that had appreciated considerably.
His method was to be the share market, then booming because of investors' almost manic enthusiasm for 'dot.com' and biotechnology stocks.
'A new life created new needs and new passions, and every night, in my computer, I noted down the movements of the market and the alterations in my finances...
'Busily I raced around New York, horning in on investors' conferences, eager to meet a financial guru or an entrepreneur who could teach me something.'
Amongst those he met were such high-flyers as Sam Waksal, who had entered the US at Ellis Island 50 years earlier, aged three-and-a-half with 'long hair in a bow and looking like a girl', and Henry Blodget, who had soared similarly during the boom until everything came unstuck.
The former would be sentenced to seven years jail and a fine of $3 million, the latter banned from working on Wall Street for life and fined $4 million, legally called a 'disgorgement' of profits, for insider trading.
At first Denby recorded modest successes but began losing badly as the market bubble burst. When the September 11 attacks of 2001 sent the market into a tailspin, he realised he had been suckered by his own greed and the American culture that fuelled it. Blinded financially and morally, he had lost $900,000 in three years, even if, along the way, he had improved relations with his sons, fallen in love again and kept his job at the most prestigious magazine on earth.
He also managed to write a cracking good book from deep inside the belly of the capitalist beast.
- Thanks to Book Warehouse, Keen Street, Lismore for supporting this column.
|
