Book review: ‘The Gods Of Greenwich,’ by Norb Vonnegut
By STEVE WEINBERG Special Contributor
Published 08 April 2011 05:28 PM
The novel of verisimilitude versus the novel of escape poses a regular conundrum for avid readers and novelists alike.
Perhaps that has been especially true during the economic collapse entering year four. Millions of readers who enjoy novels are simultaneously concerned in the real world about upside-down mortgages, bank defaults, terminated pension plans, volatile stock prices and unemployment. Much of the blame has deservedly been laid at the doors of Wall Street investment firms.
When a novelist such as Norb Vonnegut comes along, the question that looms is whether to read his works of fiction that border on reality, or to avoid them. Vonnegut, with his Harvard MBA, has been employed at Wall Street investment firms for much of his working life.
The question about how much reality is too much to absorb arose with Vonnegut’s earlier novel, Top Producer , advertised as a story that takes “readers behind the boardroom doors to reveal how Wall Street operates.” It is about a Ponzi scheme somewhat like that perpetrated by financier Bernie Madoff. But Vonnegut sold the manuscript of Top Producer to his publisher a year before Madoff confessed.
The question comes up again with The Gods of Greenwich. In the opening scene, set on Dec. 11, 2007, youthful Wall Street investment wizard Jimmy Cusack, age 32, has lost the confidence of his primary client — his father-in-law — who is removing a crippling amount of money from Cusack’s hedge fund management. As most readers probably know by now, the hedge fund concept is difficult to grasp, but one denominator is common — they are potentially high-risk investment vehicles for the very wealthy, and the managers, who tend to live in Greenwich, Conn., sometimes become obscenely rich.
Cusack entered Wall Street through the side door, having grown up Irish Catholic in Somerville, Mass., finding his way to good universities, obtaining a Rotary Club fellowship to Japan, hustling for a job atGoldman Sachs, considered by some the pinnacle of Wall Street investment banking. Then starting his own hedge fund.
The next scene in the book, on the next day, is set in Reykjavik , Iceland, a normally stable nation on the brink of financial collapse. In the bar of an expensive hotel sit three American financial wizards plotting to earn lots of money from the Icelandic debacle. One of those three men is Cyrus Leeser, another self-made Wall Street money manager who left Merrill Lynch to co-found a hedge fund. Leeser and Cusack are about to become entangled in this roiling hedge fund world, and the fallout from that collaboration drives Vonnegut’s plot. Without giving too much away, it can be disclosed that a female assassin for hire haunts the book. The mystery is not who she will kill, but who has hired her to do the killing.
Within the tense financial murder mystery narrative, all sorts of interesting miscellany arises. For example, a lesson about prosopagnosia, a rare disease afflicting Cusack’s elegant wife Emi. Her condition, not so incidentally, is more than incidental to the plot.
And the plot is not incidental to the real world. Vonnegut provides just about the right amount of verisimilitude for my taste.
Steve Weinberg is a member of the National Book Critics Circle.
books@dallasnews.com
The New York Times describes my novels as “money porn,” “a red-hot franchise,” and “glittery thrillers about fiscal malfeasance.” Through fiction I explore the dark side of money and the motivations of those who have it, want more, and will steamroll anybody who gets in their way.