American Sucker
By David Denby
Little, Brown, 337 pages, $24.95
I feel obliged to say right up front that many reviewers and readers will not like “American Sucker,” the new memoir about the vicissitudes of stock-market speculation and personal loss by David Denby, the fine film critic for The New Yorker magazine. Don’t be put off. In this intensely personal and idiosyncratic book, Denby is by turns remorseful, sanguine, despondent, keenly insightful, unbelievably obtuse, engaging, sententious, self-righteously prudish, often whining and, despite it all, quite lovable.
If you don’t recognize these contradictions in anyone you know, just look in the mirror. I did–and that is why for all its faults, I liked this book so much. Denby cuts right to the bone of our habitual intellectual and emotional posturing, the frequently irrational response by smart people to perceived threats, and the costly consequences that quite often ensue. Besides, his book is uncompromisingly literate and his prose is beautifully crafted.
“American Sucker” might more aptly have been titled “The Education of David Denby.” Like Henry Adams, Denby is by nature driven to “run order through chaos.” He believes, as he says in his narrative, in “rules, proofs, cautions.” And his goal is an ordered, productive and predictable life. Just as he seemed to have achieved it–a seven-room apartment on fashionable West End Avenue; an understanding, loving and brilliant wife; two fine sons; loyal and interesting friends; and a dream job as movie critic for The New Yorker–the bottom fell out of his life. His wife of many years announced she was leaving him. She had unexpectedly and irrevocably fallen in love with another person. For Denby, this was an inconsolable and irretrievable loss and an affront to his ingrained sense of rightful order.
Once upon a time this experience would have been considered the stuff of tragedy, but unlike King Lear and Hamlet, Denby was not hedged with divinity (except perhaps in certain New Yorker-worshiping precincts of the Upper West Side of New York City). As an anodyne to pain, Denby turned to frenetic and, in my opinion, almost juvenile speculation in largely untested technology stocks at the peak of the late, unlamented stock-market orgy. It is difficult to understand how a man of demonstrably keen intelligence and analytical abilities could have so totally suspended his critical faculties. But he did. As a result we are left with one of the most compelling evocations of the pathology of investing mania that I have come across in more than 45 years as a money manager. My hands actually shook and my palms sweated as I read his vivid descriptions. They viscerally recalled the numerous times when I, a hardened professional investor, nearly succumbed to the lure of manic speculation.
Henry Adams, always the prissy Yankee skeptic, was guarded in his use of metaphor to express the most deeply felt emotions. In “The Education of Henry Adams,” he never even mentions the names of his beloved wife, Clover, who died tragically from ingesting prussic acid, or his family’s political hero, the assassinated Abraham Lincoln.
David Denby, on the other hand, is the heir of a very different intellectual tradition: the disputatious Mitteleuropean Jewish literary culture combining profound learning, dramatic tension, piety, ebullient expression and lots of angst. Nothing is held back in “American Sucker.” One senses that all Denby hears, feels or observes is immediately expressed, without mutation by sensibility or convention. There is no reticence and almost total indifference to the limitations of language. He is willing to say anything that comes to mind, virtually unfiltered by art or artifice. The unrestrained gush of brilliantly colored language creates a palpable sense of youthful innocence on the part of a middle-age man searching for lost values, for a means of accommodating irreconcilable loss and for a road map to perpetuate enduring ties. In a way it is a sort of Upper West Side story version of “A Pilgrim’s Progress.” Herein lies the heart of its charm and undeniable attraction.
On the other hand, Denby’s headlong rush of verbiage too often runs down into narcissistic rhetoric. By its insistent repetition it diminishes our ability to respond emotionally and sympathetically to his Gethsemene.
Denby’s former wife, Cathleen Schine, in her novel “The Evolution of Jane” also addresses the problems of the sundering of a long and intimate relationship, and she does it more successfully from a strictly artistic point of view. Her book on one level is the story of two women thrown together in the Galapagos many years after the abrupt termination of an inseparable childhood friendship. At the end, the narrator is able to resolve her long-repressed feelings of guilt by the recognition that she has (in the Darwinian sense) mutated into a different person and is no longer bound by the burden of past debts. On another level, Schine is clearly offering (at least to herself) a justification as it respects the breakup of her marriage to Denby. While I think she lays too much of the responsibility on Darwin, I am impressed by her firm grip, as a skilled novelist, on the virtues of dramatic tension, irony and ambiguity in assessing human motivation.
Denby will have none of this indirection. He goes right for the jugular and insists that the reader pick the guilty parties out of the police lineup without an instant’s hesitation–that is, those perpetrators who stole his purse and, more importantly, filched his good name as a rational, responsible and moral human being. Sam Waksal, entrepreneur, bon vivant and chief executive officer of the rocketing pharmaceutical start-up ImClone Systems (now in federal prison for fraud) and Henry Blodget, Merrill Lynch telecom wunderkind (now barred for life from the securities industry for misleading investors) start out as Denby’s new-era demi-gods. By the time he has lost $900,000 in the subsequent deluge, they become the surrogates for all that he sees as rotten, oppressive, shoddy, cheap and dishonest in American financial capitalism.
He has a point, but I also think the gentleman doth protest too much. Con men have always abounded on Wall Street, and the “squeal of the sucker is music to their ears.” But they multiply and flourish like the green fig tree only when (to paraphrase Robert Frost) it’s in them and the situation. These are the rare situations that occur once or twice in a century when great crowds of intelligent, rational people willingly suspend disbelief in the expectation of making a quick and painless buck. Denby, by his own admission, was one of them, and he mostly has himself to blame for hanging around even after it was clear that the bubble had burst.
Still, his memoir is a terrific and instructive read. I hope he recoups a good deal of his stock-market losses from well-deserved book royalties. That’s the American capitalist way, isn’t it?
