A thoughtful and well-crafted look at the human stakes in high finance.
A debut drama explores the bottomless greed and dysfunction that plague Wall Street.
In the wake of the 2008 financial catastrophe, Wall Street is badly hobbled and the bond market is all but nonexistent. Urban Bank in New York City is hit particularly hard by the crisis, and hungry for a financial product to sell. French-born Francine Dubois, a “walking spreadsheet” known for her encyclopedic storehouse of knowledge and quiet meticulousness, comes up with a brash idea: package wages into bonds just as was once done with mortgages, effectively collateralizing them, and reap the benefits from managing them as well as from their after-market value. Francine’s idea is an intriguing one, and she’s asked to draw up a plan and discover a client to jump aboard; she finds Verdinion Computers, a respected company whose imprimatur ensures the bonds will have a Triple A rating. But despite her tireless efforts and creativity in midwifing what comes to be known as “Bondage Bonds,” Francine is relegated to the sidelines, not given proper credit or compensation for her innovation. She decides to branch out on her own, partnering professionally and romantically with a successful trader, Matthew Dixon, and they open their own firm, Benoit Trading. Francine expands the company to include payrolls for civil servants in France, a risky move that leaves her vulnerable to disaster. And when the market too exuberantly embraces the bonds, and a new crisis eerily familiar to the last one looms imminently, she is the most obvious candidate to be chosen as a scapegoat. Levey’s dramatization of Wall Street’s infinite avarice is ingeniously inventive, providing a scathingly astute commentary on the irrepressibility of capitalistic avarice. And no one is spared his gimlet-eyed scrutiny—even the bond ratings agencies are easily moved by their own myopically conceived self-interest. The author paints a vivid picture of a world too easily moved into a feeding frenzy: “A swelling sea of Bondage Bonds swept over the markets, and the sweet odor of fees and commissions seeped into the cloistered halls of American finance.” Francine is a fascinatingly complicated protagonist—restrained by an authentic sense of principle but not unmoved by the blandishments of material success, she walks a fine line between admirable ambition and reckless cupidity. The narrative includes a surfeit of highly technical jargon and will likely appeal most to those with a firm grasp and abiding interest in the inner machinations of the financial world. In addition, a plot turn toward the end of the tale that involves French terrorists seems overdone and implausible, unlike the rest of the novel. Levey’s writing is crisp and witty, though, and he avoids any easy moral judgments about his characters, allowing readers to experience them in all their vibrant complexity. The author’s first effort is a precocious one, characterized by unusual restraint and a sensitive attention to the moral frailty that even the noblest figures wrestle with.
A thoughtful and well-crafted look at the human stakes in high finance.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9994206-0-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Yulap
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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