Time and Again
'Extravagance' by Gary Krist
Reviewed by Michael M. Thomas
Sunday, November 3, 2002; Page BW10
By Gary Krist
Broadway. 291 pp. $24
Gary Krist must have had a very good time researching and writing this novel; I had a pretty good time reading it. That is, if I had bought it at an airport or a bookstore, I would feel I'd gotten decent value for money. If I had read it on the recommendation of a friend, we'd still be speaking. Given the current state of fiction published for the intelligent general reader, this is no small accomplishment.
OK: What's the book about, why is it entertaining? Krist has had the clever notion of locating a single story -- financial bubble hanky-panky -- involving a single cast of characters in two different segments of the space-time continuum, segments separated by three centuries and an ocean. His narrative moves back and forth, often quite seamlessly, between London at the turn of the 18th century and New York (with a diversion to Texas) at the turn of the 21st. Thus, at the end of Chapter Two, the novel's protagonist, Will Merrick, watches as a new acquaintance (Artful Dodger to Will's Oliver) darts into Cornhill and hails a London "hackney coach," but in the very next sentence, the beginning of Chapter Three, he and his new friend get into a yellow cab at the corner of Wall Street and Broadway.
Much of this era-switching is good stuff, and some of it is ingenious. The uncle who fitfully employs Merrick to scout out new investment opportunities is, in his 1690s incarnation, interested in a new kind of winch for unloading cargo vessels, while the object of his 1990s interest is "Stevedore Technologies" -- get it? -- which has a new kind of electronic data switch. People always say that the end of a financial bubble is nigh when taxi-drivers start talking about stocks; in Krist's novel, it is the watermen, who scrape a living taxiing people up and down and across the Thames, who boast of their coups on 'Change Alley. The "dogsbody" employed by a dubious stock-jobber to summon 1690s Merrick at all hours is named Ericsson, presumably the brand of cell-phone used by Merrick's 1990s IPO-jobber employer to hasten Will to Wall Street at 2 a.m.
And so on, and so on. Mainly to good effect.
Krist's larger point, most effectively made through specific correspondences of the type I've cited, is that financial bubbles are all fairly much alike because, at the end of the day, they are basically about such enduring human tendencies as greed and competitiveness. Tools, terminology, instruments may go by different names, but the working-out and the outcome will be similar, no matter how many centuries separate one outbreak of speculative folly from another. He preaches this sermon several times over, in the mouths of various characters. We've heard it before, and we'll hear it again: the old gripe about honest toil vs. what Jefferson called "legerdemain tricks on paper." About halfway through the book, in the way one hears the rumble of distant thunder when playing golf and fears for the happy completion of the round, I began to fear the imminence of a ponderous quotation from Mackay's Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, which is to bubble-decriers what Julia Child's cookbooks are to would-be chefs. And sure enough, in due course there it was, although thankfully by then I was, as it were, halfway up the 18th fairway.
The big problem with Extravagance flows from its being what I think of as a "shtick book." Krist has hit on a clever gimmick, and he works it hard, almost too hard. When the reader is returned to the 17th century, he finds himself among characters speaking a willfully archaic language -- complete with italics, in the manner of a character in "Pogo" -- that is sometimes painful. There's only so much "B'm'Faith, Madam" a reader can take. Krist could have learned a thing or two from the late Patrick O'Brien, a master of "oldspeak." The larger problem is that, scrubbed of the atmospherics and little touches, the plot is convoluted but conventional, the villainy pretty juvenile considering we're living in the Era of Andrew Fastow, the love interest laughable and the characters basically functional, a virtual guarantee in my experience of a so-so wrap-up and climax -- and so it proves.
The machinery of a financial bubble or scandal is ultimately not what makes such events artistically interesting. The thrill, and the lesson, lie in the power and skill with which the characters surrounding them are drawn. One thinks of Dickens's Merdle, Trollope's Melmotte, Dreiser's Cowperwood, Gaddis's J.R.
If Extravagance comes up short in this regard, let it still be said that it offers, as one of its characters in 1690s mode might put it, "a most agreeable and antick Diversion." In my book, that's just fine. •
Michael M. Thomas, a former columnist for the New York Observer, is the author of "Green Monday," "Hanover Place" and five other novels.
