AMERICAN SUCKER
By David Denby
Little, Brown. 337 pp. $24.95
David Denby, the renowned former film critic for New York magazine and present one for the New Yorker, likes to tackle a crisis with an abrupt rewrite of his character. In his earlier memoir, "Great Books," a creeping career malaise conspired with the university culture wars of the early 1990s to send him back to college, for a fresh encounter with Columbia University's fabled core undergraduate curriculum. Now, in "American Sucker," the collapse of Denby's 18-year marriage propels him -- via an obsessive wish to buy out his wife's share of the spacious Upper West Side apartment the couple owned -- into a second career as a small investor. The plan was to make $1 million in a single year of speculating in tech-sector investments.
It sounds ludicrous today, in the wake of the many unlovely forms of market discipline that tech stocks have undergone in the new century. But this was the early part of 2000, when tech was still riding high and, Denby notes, "the most fantastic fortunes, instantly assembled, were commonplace." By strict reckoning, his share of the apartment was $700,000, but as Denby writes, it seemed altogether sensible, and richly symbolic, to hold out for the additional 300 G's: "I seized on [the $1 million figure] because it was the essential round number, the symbol of economic liberty in the common American dream of glory."
Glory eluded him, but Denby, like countless others, caught the get-rich-now tech bug in a big way. And as he recounts, everything in the investment-mad popular culture urged him on, from the round-the-clock cable reveries of CNBC pundits to the brave prophecies of New Economy largess in the Industry Standard or TheStreet.com. Most of all, there were Denby's dramatis personae in "American Sucker," whom he befriended and courted personally -- world-class operators like ImClone's Sam Waksal (since pleaded guilty to charges related to insider trading), Merrill Lynch analyst Henry Blodget (since banned from Wall Street for life) and stock picker-cum-"Telecosm" guru George Gilder (whose only punishments have been administered by the Nasdaq free-fall).
If "American Sucker" were solely a record of Denby's market encounters and the peculiar delusions that went with them, it would be a worthy addition to the great literature of business fiascoes. But as a critic with a sideline in interpreting Western values, Denby has his eye on bigger thematic game, and this is where his book goes badly awry. For as the Nasdaq grinds on toward its appointed fate, "American Sucker" becomes an earnest, and deeply wrongheaded, meditation on greed, right conduct and the good life. Here the rickety conceit of Denby's investor crusade collapses into an unsightly mixture of pompous petulance and stubborn entitlement.
This transformation largely begins when Denby tries reading some books that dissent from the great hosannas that greeted the 1990s tech boom. In particular, Juliet Schor's critique of consumer behavior, "The Overspent American," really gets his blood pumping. Considering the plight of near-bankrupt wage earners, Denby does what any good member of the investor class would: He blames them for their lack of initiative. Schor's subjects "lacked pleasure in work," he sententiously lectures. "They were stuck in routine or exhausting jobs and couldn't find the time or energy to learn something new, in the manner of those admirable people -- millions of Americans did it -- who retrain themselves, going bleary-eyed to community college at night in hope of a fresh start."
This warmed-over Horatio Alger rhetoric is very hard to stomach coming from a man cushioned in a handsomely paid magazine job, trying to stake himself to a stock market windfall in order to keep control of a $1.4 million apartment financed largely by his own family inheritance -- someone who spent not one but two tours of duty at an Ivy League university, subsidized the second time via the good graces of a book contract. Bleary-eyed community college night classes, indeed.
But Denby wants the reader to trip out on a more fundamental point: His investing binge also represents the fulfillment of the crusading spirit of his boomer generation. Investors are nothing less than social visionaries, determined "to be part of a social organism growing at enormous speed. . . . One more time, damn it. . . . We were taking part in a social transformation. . . . Greed, at that moment, was fired by hope and seared by risk."
Small wonder, then, that Denby should be so monumentally unself-aware throughout his year of riding the Wall Street tiger: It's all greed, and it's all, apparently, good. So when, for example, Waksal totes up the figures for the first year's trial of his cancer wonder drug Erbitux, Denby is not for an instant detained by the consideration that the treatment is priced at a stiff $1,000 per injection -- enough to exhaust in no time even that handful of insurance plans that would partially cover an experimental drug treatment. No, Denby is merely "flabbergasted" by Waksal's calculations -- 60,000 advanced colorectal sufferers receiving injections biweekly, working out to a year's return for ImClone of $1.56 billion. "I had no idea the total could reach anything like that amount," Denby enthuses over the gouging of desperately ill cancer patients. "Sam smiled and laughed."
Waksal didn't get the last laugh, and it's true that with the trials of Messrs. Blodget and Waksal fresh in his mind, Denby tries to reassess his earlier sunny estimation of greed as a visionary social good. But it's also true that he comes up woefully short. Or long, rather, since he argues to singularly absurd effect that you can affix a clear monetary value to the threshold at which greed becomes socially destructive -- and that figure turns out to be a cool $5 million in liquid assets (oh, and two pieces of prime real estate, "nice places to live, one in the city and one in the country"). Objections to this kind of reasoning are countless: Is it okay to be fleeced by someone with just $4 million and an exceptionally large condo? Should we uncritically endorse Denby's view that he was himself a victim of high-rolling chicanery, just because he was the poorer of the two market predators when he swooned into Waksal's arms? (Insider traders "stole from me," Denby fumes over his squandered million-dollar birthright. Tell it to a cancer patient, pal.) And why, pray tell, should we interpret greed as a function of individual acts of "dishonesty, false promises, and fantasy" in the first place, when the economy at large, and most especially the stock market, is skewed so overwhelmingly toward the less colorful but far more damaging interests of large corporations and institutions?
Denby doesn't say, and it's a fair bet he doesn't know. But that is, of course, the sort of bet only a sucker would take.
