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Boom and bust, then and now Novel of high finance alternates between 1690s London and 1990s New York Reviewed by Mark Athitakis |
Sunday, October 6, 2002
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Extravagance By Gary Krist BROADWAY; 291 PAGES; $24Take a look at the business pages these days and you might notice an odd thing: They're not really about business anymore. Ideas -- about ethics, crime and trust -- are the coin of the realm now. There are still the usual stories about money changing hands and deals being made, but the Big Story now is the Big Lesson: What can we learn from the dot-com crash? How can U.S. business avoid another Enron debacle? What will it take to recover? Why have CEOs become so greedy? Gary Krist's third novel, "Extravagance," looks at those questions and responds with a knowing smirk: The only thing to learn from a bubble bursting is that there will be another bubble, and that it will burst again. It offers a traditional, dangerously hackneyed plot: Young man goes to the big city to make something of himself. Krist escapes that problem with an inventive conceit, telling the story of young Will Merrick's foray into high finance by describing him in two settings. "Extravagance" alternates between 1690s London, as it fast becomes the wealthiest city in the world, and 1990s New York City, at the height of Silicon Alley Internet mania. It's a virtuosic showcase of Krist's talents as a stylist that also helps emphasize Krist's main point: The new, new thing is, in fact, as old as time. We first meet Merrick in the heart of London's dingy, rude and perpetually moving Change Alley. There, would-be power brokers are beginning to wrestle with the relatively new engines of commerce that powered the British Empire: public finance, private equity, bills of exchange, selling risk, shorting stocks. Will, a twentysomething fresh from the small town of Wapping, is hungry for the novelty. "I have an enduring fascination with the Stocks," he pleads, "and would fain make my fortune by the buying and selling, if 'twere possible." Through Ted Witherspoon, a Change Alley "stock-jobber," he begins to see the power of speculation. Ships, horseshoes, mechanical wig curlers, winches -- everything can be invested in, everything can make money. " 'Tis as if England had spread a great net or web o'er the earth," an entrepreneur tells Merrick, "designed to snag its choicest offerings." Fast-forward to Wall Street, circa 1999. Merrick is now a wide-eyed boy from Indiana. Finding his day job at his uncle's wine distributorship a bit old-fashioned, he's seduced instead by Internet start-ups. Though he's anxious that the company he's most deeply invested in manufactures "nothing yet, some amazing new electronic switching something-or-other," the promise of quick money is too attractive. Witherspoon, now a Ritalin-popping fast talker evangelizing the New Economy, explains the dot-com sensibility in three words: "History," he tells Merrick, "is crap." Lesson learned, Merrick makes more money than he ever imagined, falls in love with a wealthy woman and in less than a year is fully entranced by the dizzying world of modern finance. Well, you know how it ends; anybody who now takes a deep breath before opening that earnings statement envelope knows all too intimately how it ends. Without question, Krist has taken a risk by telling a story whose denouement has been splashed repeatedly on Page One, and his use of the time-shifting conceit has its own dangers. In truth, it doesn't take long to establish the idea that there are parallels between 17th century London finance and the recent dot-com boom. It's a thesis that makes for a fine analysis essay. For a novel, though, it can be thin gruel. Yet "Extravagance" works. Krist's skill at dialogue and setting deftly evokes language and character of two eras -- pneumaticks and farthings in the 17th century, routers and Palm Pilots in the 20th. The time shifts between chapters (sometimes within a single sentence) can be exhilarating or amusingly ironic, as when a hip modern dance club morphs into a ghastly insane asylum open to spectators, or an SUV transforms into a horse named Escalade. The novel's main strength, though, is Krist's refusal to be didactic about his boom-bust theme. If greed is bad, it also works seductively. Merrick isn't a young man who lusts for money because he's monochromatically arrogant; he lusts because he slowly comes to feel he has no choice. The split personality of "Extravagance" mirrors Krist's career in fiction. His two short-story collections, "The Garden State" and "Bone by Bone," are furnished with elegant, interior tales about modern relationships and their collapse. They've earned him acclaim as a storyteller in the John Updike vein. But as a novelist, he's settled for the page-turner. Following a hard-boiled mystery ("Bad Chemistry") and a political thriller ("Chaos Theory"), the propulsive tone of "Extravagance" is still closer to genre fiction than the Great American Novel. Here, Krist comes as close as he ever has to having it both ways. He's found a big story with a big lesson. Mark Athitakis is a writer living in San Francisco. |
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