Review by New York Times Review
DANA VACHON'S first novel begins with Tommy Quinn scanning the crowd gathered for the engagement party of his friend Roger Thorne. The 24-year-old casts his eyes on the investment bankers, the skinny women and their Botoxed mothers, the New York elite gathered at the Racquet & Tennis Club, a "limestone manse sitting like a sphinx on Park Avenue." Quinn applauds himself for being on "the most prosperous street in the most prosperous city in the most prosperous nation that ever lived." Standing on the club's terrace he feels he is "flying." The set-up is hoary - wide-eyed outsider comes to the vast metropolis. From it the novelist can go in two directions: he can give his character a sentimental education in big city life or he can make the world he enters so ridiculous that we can dismiss it without having to go. He can choose to be Thomas Wolfe, or Tom. At the novel's beginning it appears Vachon, himself a former investment banker, is going to give us Thomas. Quinn is sensitive: he is thinking of becoming a doctor and helping the poor - he would already have done so if his grades had gotten him into a better medical school. He had a brother who died young. His father has never recovered from not making partner at Cravath, Swaine & Moore and has become a serial joiner - a "great sycophantic dynamo," who has just become a member of his eighth country club. There, at the Fourth of July cocktail party, young Quinn meets the alluring Frances Sloan. Frances uses phrases like "beautifully brutal" and says "between cradle and grave, in the end, there was nothing" (in French, no less). She is blond and depressed, and Quinn is hooked. The tree has met its ax, Scott his Zelda. They become a couple. As her mental problems become more serious, she begins to deliberately cut herself. Quinn has not bargained on being her full-time nurse. Part of a generation of "desperate young materialists" he is about to start work at J.S. Spenser, a prestigious investment bank. In the bank's training program, which he wittily describes as "affirmative action for the already affirmed," he meets Thorne, who is mad for sex, drugs and money and determined to drain the '00s of every drop. Thorne, a descendant of the WASP establishment, guides Quinn through the labyrinth of Spenser divisions until they find the red hot center, the mergers and acquisitions department led by Terence Mathers. "This guy is a rock star," Thorne realizes. "Let's hook it up. We've gotta get into the M&A group." Because Mathers used to "dog" Thorne's sister at Princeton, they do. In the division Thorne shines and Quinn stumbles: he botches an early deal in which the firm is trying to sell off some oil fields. Thorne next draws a bead on the Latin American mergers and acquisitions team led by Manuel Oliveira Rodrigo Orjuela de Navarro. "I think we need to rock it with Miguel," Thorne tells Quinn. "In fact, I think we need to rock it with Miguel big time!" Manuel succumbs to Thorne's charms, too - they do shots at a trendy nightclub with some Fashion Week models - and includes him and Quinn in a conference in Cabo, where the firm has rented a resort for "just a bit under a million dollars" to pursue Latin America's finanical elite. Thorne relieves Manuel of his beautiful girlfriend - "you're such a fine babe, babe," he tells her - while Quinn, "glaringly useless even by J.S. Spenser's standards," tries to hold Frances' scarred hand long-distance. One night a Latin plutocrat invites the Spenser bankers to a "Pirates of the Caribbean" party on his yacht, to celebrate his daughter's 16th birthday. Early in the party the D.J. plays a song of homage to commemorate Manuel's kidnapped cousin, a great dancer. Shortly after, Zapatistas, initially confused with costumed guests, attack the yacht and capture Manuel too. In the middle of extensive gunplay, Quinn saves Thorne's life by dropping a "$20,000 bottle of Champagne" on a Zapatista aiming an Uzi in his direction. "The Cristal crashed down on him, leaving only a mangled corpse and bloody bubbles that surged across the deck in a red tide," Quinn notes. He and Thorne wind up overboard and are washed up on a remote beach, eventually making their way back to civilization. Quinn and Frances are reunited. What a strange scene. It doesn't fit the book Vachon seems to be writing. If it did, then Frédéric Moreau would have run a dragoon through with a bayonet in "Sentimental Education" and Nick Carraway would have taken George Wilson's revolver and shot him dead by the pool. There's no reason "Mergers & Acquisitions" shouldn't choose Tom over Thomas as a model. The absurd world of Manhattan moneymaking is always a good subject. But the scene highlights the problem "Mergers & Acquisitions" has from the beginning. Vachon's broad comic tendency keeps intruding on the novel of manners he seems to want to write. This tonal puzzlement defeats "Mergers & Acquisitions" long before the events on the yacht jump the shark. Quinn is, for example, throughout the book saddened by the death of his promising older brother at prep school. That's an honorable if hackneyed plot device, undercut by the number of times Vachon mentions that what killed him was an egg roll fried in peanut oil. And is it funny to have Quinn and Frances at a dinner at Cipriani in which the main comedy comes from one of the guests' being a midget? And is it really appropriate for the initials of some Latin characters to form naughty anagrams (cast your eyes back to Manuel's full name)? New York relishes novelty, and novels that convey its flavor must capture this. Does this cultural observation by Quinn feel fresh to you?: "You could produce 90 minutes of rhesus monkeys playing Nerf football, and as long as you got the damn thing screened at Cannes people would want to know you for having done it." Quinn and his father shop at Brooks Brothers and he and his friends eat at Smith & Wollensky and Le Bilboquet. They do cocaine in bathrooms as if the world stopped in 1985. They talk on Motorola Razrs when the guys selling fake watches on Fifth have them. Socially the '00s may be the '80s all over again, but even so, no book purporting to bring us cultural news should be set in an M&A division in 2007. If Vachon's signifiers seem drawn at leisure, his prose feels hurried. The night Quinn and Frances first try to make love, Quinn says: "The louver doors breathed seawater and night as amid the dying flowers of summer we tried again and again to climb into one another." Frances' skin is "like alabaster dipped in sun." When "coils of honeysuckle platinum ... escaped" her pulled-back hairdo, they "hung down her temples like laurels." I think she would forgive him these clichés - she's hardly an original creation herself - but I think he should promise her one thing. After they finally do consummate, he fondles "her firm B-cup breasts." If the space between birth and death is really as short as Frances says it is, he at least owes her another way to put that. Quinn, about to start work at a prestigious bank, is part of a generation of 'desperate young materialists.' D. T. Max is the author of "The Family That Couldn't Sleep: A Medical Mystery."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
Presented in the form of a monologue, which is a difficult technique to manage in a novel because the author has to ensure plausibility while guarding against monotony, Hamid's second novel succeeds so well it begs the question--what other narrative format than a sustained monologue could have been as appropriate? Generally, this is a 9/11 novel or, rather, a post-9/11 one. But to see it on its own terms, which, because of its distinctive scenario, is impossible not to do, it eludes categorization. A young Pakistani man, educated at Princeton and employed in a highly prestigious financial-analysis firm in New York, was about to start a brilliant career and had fallen for a young woman whose commitment to him, it must be admitted, was partial and elusive when the terrorist attacks occurred. Answering to his own conscience, he could not remain in the U.S. By the pull of his true personal identity, he must return to Pakistan, despite his reluctance to leave the enigmatic but beguiling young woman behind. From the perspective of a few years later, the young man relates his American experiences to an American man he meets in a cafe, whose visit to Lahore may or may not have to do with the young man's recent anti-American activities. This novel's firm, steady, even beautiful voice proclaims the completeness of the soul when personal and global issues are conjoined. --Brad Hooper Copyright 2007 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Hamid's second book (after Moth Smoke) is an intelligent and absorbing 9/11 novel, written from the perspective of Changez, a young Pakistani whose sympathies, despite his fervid immigrant embrace of America, lie with the attackers. The book unfolds as a monologue that Changez delivers to a mysterious American operative over dinner at a Lahore, Pakistan, cafe. Pre-9/11, Princeton graduate Changez is on top of the world: recruited by an elite New York financial company, the 22-year-old quickly earns accolades from his hard-charging supervisor, plunges into Manhattan's hip social whirl and becomes infatuated with Erica, a fellow Princeton graduate pining for her dead boyfriend. But after the towers fall, Changez is subject to intensified scrutiny and physical threats, and his co-workers become markedly less affable as his beard grows in ("a form of protest," he says). Erica is committed to a mental institution, and Changez, upset by his adopted country's "growing and self-righteous rage," slacks off at work and is fired. Despite his off-putting commentary, the damaged Changez comes off as honest and thoughtful, and his creator handles him with a sympathetic grace. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
(See Prepub Alert, LJ 12/06) (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by School Library Journal Review
Adult/High School-In a Lahore market, Changez, a Pakistani, is confronting an American spy bent on assassinating him. He manipulates the encounter, seizing the chance to tell his story-and to be heard. His narrative style (monologue, or perhaps an imagined dialogue) can be distracting, but clearly reveals his interior world and motivations. He tells of coming from an upper-crust but financially reduced family, attending Princeton on scholarship, having a romance with a fellow Ivy League student, and winning a job with the most elite of New York financial companies. To succeed, he must focus on the economic fundamentals of companies targeted for takeover while setting aside any concern about the human suffering his analysis will cause. He's willing to do this, and is very much at home in culturally diverse Manhattan, until 9/11, when everything changes for him. Then, Changez rebels. He grows a beard (in solidarity with his culture of origin, not as an indication of religious fundamentalism); though he appreciates the opportunities he's been given, he rejects the role America has been playing in the world; and he returns to Pakistan, where he becomes a popular professor known for activism. He is now, in America's view, an enemy. Multiple culture shocks over a short space of time have shaken this intense young man's life, and his journey is fast-moving and suspenseful. Some readers might not warm to Changez's cold brilliance, ambition, and class-consciousness, but the growth he experiences through college, disillusionment, and engagement with the larger world could capture the imaginations of thoughtful teens.-Christine C. Menefee, formerly at Fairfax County Public Library, VA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A young Muslim's American experience raises his consciousness and shapes his future in this terse, disturbing successor to the London-based Pakistani author's first novel, Moth Smoke (2000). It's presented as a "conversation," of which we hear only the voice of protagonist Changez, speaking to the unnamed American stranger he encounters in a caf in the former's native city of Lahore. Changez describes in eloquent detail his arrival in America as a scholarship student at Princeton, his academic success and lucrative employment at Underwood Samson, a "valuation firm" that analyzes its clients' businesses and counsels improvement via trimming expenses and abandoning inefficient practices--i.e., going back to "fundamentals." Changez's success story is crowned by his semi-romantic friendship with beautiful, rich classmate Erica, to whom he draws close during a summer vacation in Greece shared by several fellow students. But the idyll is marred by Erica's distracted love for a former boyfriend who died young and by the events of 9/11, which simultaneously make all "foreigners" objects of suspicion. Changez reacts in a manner sure to exacerbate such suspicions ("I was caught up in the symbolism of it all, the fact that someone had so visibly brought America to her knees"). A visit home to a country virtually under siege, a breakdown that removes the fragile Erica yet further from him and the increasing enmity toward "non-whites" all take their toll: Changez withdraws from his cocoon of career and financial security (". . . my days of focusing on fundamentals were done") and exits the country that had promised so much, becoming himself the bearded, vaguely menacing "stranger" who accompanies his increasingly worried listener to the latter's hotel. The climax builds with masterfully controlled irony and suspense. A superb cautionary tale, and a grim reminder of the continuing cost of ethnic profiling, miscommunication and confrontation. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
