SNATCH 2&20

A slacker tries to escape the effects of a shortsighted business deal in Fellows’ debut novel.

Giles Goodenough is an American-born, Oxford-educated, trust-funded 20-something who has so far been able to coast through life. He admits, in the narration, to “bumbling around in London for almost all of the previous decade.” The current decade finds him in New York City, faking his way through each day as a research analyst on Wall Street—a position that his wealthy father arranged for him after realizing that his son was wasting a very expensive college degree. Giles is married to Cherry, a selfie-obsessed, ex–exotic dancer–turned–Instagram entrepreneur and future mother of his child. Giles’ job surveying the stock activity of tech startups, including one called Zyxview, has drawn the attention of the ruthless billionaire founder Peter O. Silver, “the Big Swinging Dick of the moment,” who owns the cheekily named hedge fund POS Capital. Silver woos Giles away from his job with an intriguing offer: He wants Giles to go undercover, fly to San Francisco, and get close to Zyxview’s founder, Egon Crump, who’s notable for his unusual sartorial choices, including a fur vest, and who reveals himself to be attracted to the straight Giles. Cherry also becomes embroiled in the industrial-espionage melodrama and eventually becomes another of Peter’s pawns. Giles’ assignment is to extract details about Zyxview’s financial holdings and its future economic stability, which he does, as Egon is surprisingly forthcoming. However, this information comes at a cost that gradually reveals itself as the highly readable story progresses.

In this gloriously sardonic book, both of the tech giants come across as caricatures, but Fellows describes them with a great amount of care. He seamlessly incorporates such larger-than-life personalities into a narrative that addresses very serious themes, including unbridled corporate corruption, vanity, hypocrisy, “the wheels of capitalism,” and how rampant materialism in the modern age keeps humanity from moving forward in a meaningful way. Giles finds himself pivoting between trying to get the approval of his employer and keeping his sanity amid so much greed and criminality. Along the way, Fellows relentlessly satirizes tech companies and their extravagance, and his novel’s timeliness and relevance are sure to be among the book’s biggest selling points. He expertly employs his own experience as a former hedge fund manager to make the settings feel real even as his characters become embroiled in ever larger and more serious calamities. After a stampede during a product unveiling, for example, Giles notes, “Ten people were crushed to death. And the entire event dominated media coverage for days. It was pure Americana. Even Donald Trump was jealous, apparently.” The descriptions and dialogue are consistently pithy and snarky throughout the novel, and Giles’ narration is informative about tech-company matters; the author gives him just the right amount of self-deprecation to make him a charming storyteller. Overall, this novel will be a riotous ride for readers.

Fast-paced and often hilarious fiction that may appeal most to members of the tech startup set.