http://lareviewofbooks.org/post/17550682956/satyrs
Finance and economics clearly play an important role in contemporary history
. But if you’re aiming to write “serious” literature there’s a tendency to write about neurotic suburbanites or upper-middle class dilettantes. That stuff doesn’t interest me at all.
Peter Mountford A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism Mariner Books, April 2011. 289 pp.
Set in Bolivia amid the uncertainty of the first weeks of Evo Morales’s presidency in late 2005, Peter Mountford’s compulsively readable first novel is a book about money. A Young Man’s Guide is a bildungsroman in reverse, tracing the psychic dissolution of the somewhat-likeable protagonist Gabriel de Boya from his first, broke years in New York after graduating from Brown to the cocooned state of permanent transience he achieves as a hedge fund manager. Like Balzac’s Lucien de Rubempre, Gabriel is at once highly nuanced and an allegorical figure. No better or worse than anyone else, he’s just trying to get by in a world that’s systemically compromised.
While Mountford, a former financial analyst, is highly informed and informative about the macroeconomic game theories that order the world and color the most intimate parts of our lives, it is his novel’s premise that the sweeping life-force of capital might animate a personal narrative that is truly radical.
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