Denby's Search for Easy Money

American Sucker is about why David Denby wants to keep his day job as a film critic for The New Yorker. And indeed he should; he ought to stay out of both personal investing and writing silly books about his personal woes.

The best part of American Sucker deals with the hysterics of the technology boom that resulted first in extraordinary wealth, then penniless embarrassment, on the part of the little investors who tried to ride the wave. It features savage reassessments of some of the big personalities of the 1990s boom years, like Henry Blodget of Merrill Lynch, Sam Waksal of ImClone, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, and technology prophet George Gilder. Instead of building a market utopia, as Denby accurately assesses it, these men built a house of cards that was sold to people as a lifetime investment, then ran out just before the thing collapsed.

But as he confesses, Denby's true purpose is to talk about himself. Denby speaks as an everyman with typical American troubles--a failing marriage, dissatisfaction with his hobbies--who was lured by the typical American idea that wealth would help clean up the mess in his life. He invests his savings in technology ventures, but loses every penny of the $800,000 he started with. By recounting his obsession with the CNBC ticker, market pundits, soirees with entrepreneurs, and Greenspan's pronouncements, he shows us just how naked and empty his life became when he tried to replace his marriage with a lust for money.

American Sucker could have been satisfying with a solid, New Yorker-quality account of the personalities and culture behind the boom. But Denby ruins this narrative by absorbing it in a sloppy, annoying personal memoir.

The book floats between the cultural criticism of Tom Wolfe and the redemptive confession of St. Augustine--though not as well written as Wolfe, and not as powerful as Augustine. For all his supposed soul-searching, Denby simply blames everyone around for hoodwinking him. While there's contrition for falling for the lure, there's never any sense that it was people like him--desperate to make a quick buck--who made the boom possible: "Like a convert lost in a frenzy of devotion, I threw myself into the new religion, and I forgot all the ways it could fool you, betray you, undermine you."

Prophets and hucksters, however, are nothing without their clients. Denby calls Waksal and Blodget liars and cheats. He scolds Greenspan for his faith in market capitalism. He faults Gilder for believing that technology holds the key to better lives. But did these men make the boom alone, or did they exploit the eagerness of upper-middle-class intellectuals like Denby to make money without doing any of the things that they disdain (like employing people, making and marketing products, and watching profit margins)?

Of course, Denby is glib and funny in recounting his myriad errors of judgment and his small but guilt-inducing tastes for pornography and anonymous sexual encounters. But that's easy pickings--he's not an economist or a financial analyst, so no one can seriously hold him accountable for not seeing the cracks in the facade. It's much harder to ask whether the flaw was you.

As a result, the book is trite. Denby waxes poetic about the nature of love, and of "constructing new hopes" and "the paradigm of life as ceaseless change," but no big ideas lie behind all of those pretty words. He mangles the musings of Joseph Schumpeter, Aristotle, Plato, Nietzsche, Goethe, and Theodore Dreiser in an attempt to seem erudite and wise. And like the postmodern novelists who write fictional accounts of the same self-flagellation, his travails fail to produce any useful insights about actual happiness. That, after all, would be a hard book to write--and one suspects that the lure of easy money has never quite lost hold of Denby.

American Sucker reads like a book written quickly to earn back a few lost investment dollars. Denby's insights about life are so watered-down that his endless platitudes slip through your fingers, leaving you with nothing at all. He carelessly conflates stock markets and enthusiasm for technology. His conclusion is that greed--which is unfulfilling, in case you didn't know--fueled the stock market. He realizes that he wants to spend more time with his kids and have a nice lady friend. Big discoveries.

In the end, he simply passes from one obsession to another: from making money to finding a female companion. One hopes for the best in his new relationship, but we've learned that busts often follow booms--chances are, if he makes any money from this book, we'll have to sit through another 350 pages of this stuff. It'll be a sure-fire investment.