What is the Jungian shadow of a finance bro? What’s behind his persona, his public face? Neither Jordan Belfort (The Wolf of Wall Street), nor Michael Lewis (Liar’s Poker, The Big Short) bother themselves with that hidden but consequential feature of a man of action. They give us juicy bits about behind-the-scenes shenanigans, but steer clear from pondering on the origin of those shenanigans. What we see is public masks –– very entertaining, but superficial. They’re too incurious, and, perhaps, too scared to explore what’s beneath that mask.
An average finance bro’s daily routine is overwhelming. It consumes one’s mind, spirit, and talents, and leaves no space for even a minor transgression. But no matter how robotic PE guys or hedgies appear to an outsider, under that straight jacket, there are accumulated emotions that need to find an outlet. Because that outlet cannot be art –– art takes time that they simply don’t have –– it has to be an easy substitute. Some choose sex or drugs; others –– playing a role.
My novel’s main protagonist, Andy Sylvain, is cosplaying a lot. We first meet him at a closed-off costume party at The Pierre Hotel, where the city’s finance professionals, in drag, perform NSFW parodies of American pop-culture bits. The party’s attendees’ main complaint is ‘the lack of yield,’ and they roast Bernanke, the Fed Chairman, as the source of their ennui. They seem to be happy to pin all their troubles on one man and on the yield curve; otherwise they’d have to examine other, existential sources of their dread. Still, the glimmers of deeper discontent break through the party-goers’ affectations. “Imagine what we could’ve been if we didn’t have to watch the Fed’s every move,” laments the emcee.
What they could’ve been is a valid question. They’re all smart, sensitive people, built for doing other, better things. In his other life, David Solomon, Goldman’s CEO, would’ve been a DJ. Andy, a smart, situationally attuned guy, is aware of this disconnect, but is resistant to its implications. On his 50th birthday, as he languidly enters a bond data into his Bloomberg, he acknowledges to himself that this is what he will be doing for the next 30 years. Andy’s friend Misha, a successful former credit trader, took a different path out of this predicament. Misha left the racket, to the puzzlement of many of his colleagues. “The wilder the party the bigger the grief that they’re trying to assuage,” a brooding Misha tells Andy. What grief? Andy is afraid to ask, for the answer could carry unsettling implications. “Whatever you say, bro,” is his meek response.
As Misha is slowly retreating from the civilized world, Joanna, a buoyant derivatives saleswoman (and Andy’s love interest), is embracing her masculine side. Joanna is the archetype of Western third-wave corporate feminism, aggressive and expedient. At this point in her career, she’s unfazed by the compromises she had to make, and is shielding herself from uncomfortable thoughts, and from the vagaries and cruelties of her world with glibness and sarcasm. “Many people want to be us,” she says to Andy, as if to nip Andy’s nascent doubts in the bud. She doesn’t want to be bothered with any of that meta stuff.
Andy’s boss, Dave Pinkus, too, found a way to cope. Pinkus recalls how he once retired but then came back to work a few months later, because he ‘felt castrated,’ and he couldn’t bear ‘not knowing where the spreads were for this and that.’ “I’ll be doing this till the day I die,” Pinkus concedes. Andy’s other friend and colleague, Doug Caldera, in a rare moment of drunken clarity, admits that if he had to do it all over again, he would rather go serve in the Marines and get into real fights and get real scars. “The only people who appreciate what I do are assholes,” he cries. In a sober state, though, Caldera, like Joanna and Pinkus, is fully reconciled with his lot.
This mental push-and-pull permeates the characters’ conversations and sentiments, but any conclusions are studiously avoided. On some level the traders, a bright and worldly bunch, know what ought to be done, but they prefer to stay idle and gently mock their situation with the ‘look at us, schmucks’ helplessness. Such helplessness is a bonding ritual.
There are some, though, who attempt radical measures. When Andy goes to an upscale and secretive rehab, the kind where hedgies go to treat their drug habit, he comes across a man there who had faced his shadow and it shook him, and who now tries to remedy the resulting discontent with straining physical hardship. That man is not in a good shape, not by our usual measurements. Andy’s all-purpose defense mechanism –– joking when in doubt or distress –– leads him to try to diffuse the somber moment with levity, to which the weathered and bruised man replies ‘You can’t identify the disease. Thus you can’t cure it.’ Later, in a conversation with the rehab’s enigmatic warden, Andy learns that the true purpose of this rehab is not to guide alcoholics and addicts into sobriety, but to facilitate atonement for the restless, wistful rich –– a ‘product that they can’t get anywhere else.’ Unnerved, Andy leaves the rehab. He’s not yet ready to buy that kind of product.
There’s a presence, throughout the novel, of a force impervious to logic and reason. It’s the woods. The woods are the symbol of the surreal and of the unknowable, the antidote to all the structured rituals of the city life. The woods haunt Andy. They surround his Westchester estate, he gets lost in the forest while in the rehab, and, in the end, this is where he finds refuge. The only characters who feel comfortable in the woods are the two Russians (Misha and Oleg, Andy’s contractor), and Andy’s ex-wife Madeline and his daughter Ava. Despite being family, the two women are a mystery to Andy. They’re skilled equestrians who prefer pastoral life to the city’s glitz. Madeline’s main guiding principle is aesthetics, and her biggest fear is ‘young men’s initiatives.’ Madeline and Ava embody the feminine spirit of nature; were they born a few centuries earlier, they’d be cast out as witches. As for the Russians’ love of the woods, well, there’s a hidden message there: a call to recede into the boreal wilderness for a century or so, and to contemplate their purpose as a nation (Misha examines his Russianness a lot and his conclusions are grim).
The events of the novel take place at the very end of the pre-Trumpian era, 2014-2015, when normalcy had already begun to crumble, and it is felt but not yet acknowledged by the characters. But a trend had been set. We observe men who have discarded their agency, but who are hell-bent on proving to the world that they’re free. The men in the novel are civilized: they manifest their freedom through crude jokes, LARPing, and breaking long-established norms and rules –– a set of actions that Misha calls a ‘simulacrum of rebellion.’ We know now how that trend will culminate.
‘The Hermit’ is not a mystery novel and not a crime fiction, so there are no unexpected plot twists and big reveals. Andy’s exit is something that is already baked in (it’s in the name!), and what I set out to do was to chronicle the slow process of one man’s abdication. Andy is a fictional character, but this is how I’d imagine it would happen in real life. There are 25 chapters of gradual unraveling, some illustrated (by me!), that I will be publishing on my Substack starting in January. I’m thinking, a chapter a week?