PLAY MONEY

A 30-year-old Wall Street lawyer and first-novelist depicts young men caught up in the sparkling and expensive world of 1990s financial intrigue.

Tim Fletcher is a bit disillusioned with the biz after eight months, and can’t stop himself from mentioning the Post sympathetically and using chewing tobacco when he finally meets Kathleen, whose library is as impressive as his own. Alan is either a big mover and shaker, or simply a proxy who can’t stop himself from shaking when homeboys on the subway leer at him. And Martin is the smooth operator with a deal for both of them: some hot new software, needing only a lawyer and a venture capitalist to make their dream IPO come true. How can Tim resist, with all those D-cups passing him endlessly on the street, and how will Alan otherwise hope to reconcile his Jewish mother and secular humanist wife when all his other deals keep dissolving beneath his feet? Of course they both go for Martin’s deal, but is it a fantasy? A Faustian bargain? And what will Kathleen think now that she’s calling him “honey”? Apart from a lot of financial jargon Tom Clancy would aspire to if he were to tackle the financial world, Allen’s characters and his New York are largely familiar (as if with his authorial eye on film execs, Allen describes one character as parading about like Tom Cruise at the first screening of Top Gun). But if the author lacks something in fictional craft, he at least attempts to redeem things with portraits of financial old hands and savvy analysts, though his best bit has nothing to do with either character or plot: “The ticker—the chosen metaphor for an epoch too impatient, too cocksure, to leave the choosing to the future, its symbolic nature attested to by its misnomer and mass proliferation at exactly the moment when it was no longer of any use. It did not tick; what did anymore?”

A debut novel with lots of zeroes coming after it.