American Sucker

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In early 2000, the bottom dropped out of the life of New Yorker writer David Denby when his wife announced she was leaving him. To make matters worse, it looked as if he might lose the beloved New York apartment they shared with their children. Determined to hold on to his home and seized by the "irrational exuberance" of the stock market, then approaching its peak, Denby joined the investment frenzy with a particular goal: to make one million dollars so he could buy out his wife's share of their place. Denby gathered courage from stock analysts and from the siren song of CNBC. He listened both skeptically and raptly to dreaming tech gurus and boastful CEOs at investment conferences. He got to know such charming and persuasive New Economy stars as ImClone founder (and Martha Stewart buddy) Sam Waksal and Merrill Lynch Internet analyst Henry Blodget, both of whom would eventually be disgraced in scandals that affected millions of investors. Racing around the country, he struggled to understand the leading-edge technologies of fiber optics and anticancer biotech therapies. He plunged into a season of mania and was swept forward on the alternating currents of hope, greed, hucksterism, and American optimism that caught up so many in that era -- with cataclysmic results. American Sucker is a beautifully written, mesmerizing account of those years of madness. What begins as a money chase becomes an encounter with such eternal issues as envy, time, love, and death, leading to a slow recovery of sanity and happiness. This is a classic tale of the bubble related not by a market guru or an investment professional but by a witty, perceptive, and eloquent outsider.

FROM THE CRITICS

The New York Times

Above all, this is a book about desire, not only for handsome material wealth and a comfortable, familiar home, but for love, sex, fame, fine objects (namely, a shining blue Audi sports sedan that functions as Denby's mechanical Helen, seductively beckoning him toward catastrophe and putting him on the wrong side of the old gods) and even aesthetic pleasure. In sketching his own intensely crosshatched character, so ripe for exploitation by Wall Street hucksters who played on his heady hopes about the market while suavely anesthetizing his intestinal doubts, Denby the critic reveals his tricky feelings about the movies he makes his living writing about. Mostly they disappoint him, deeply, chronically, and the soulless industrial process that creates them outrages his lofty sensibilities; but at the same time he's realistic enough to know that without the underlying profit motive the screen would go dark. Denby strikes a worldly compromise, meticulously sifting through the dreck for big-budget films that also succeed as art, then aggressively, sincerely promoting them. The system depresses him, but the system is all he has. — Walter Kirn

Publishers Weekly

"I wanted to be wealthy," Denby bluntly admits near the end of this absorbing memoir of the dot-com boom and bust. "I didn't make it." Like millions of other amateur investors in 2000 and 2001, Denby (Great Books) was swept along by greed, by the nearly messianic belief that the stock market offered easy opportunities for unlimited prosperity. Denby sunk hundreds of thousands of dollars into the Nasdaq, digested unhealthy amounts of CNBC and the Wall Street Journal and forged friendships with some of the era's brightest stars (and, later, its most public criminals). He lost his balance in the excess of the time-stock tickers in strip clubs; parties at executives' lofts-and then lost his money when the market crashed. ("The ax had swung," Denby writes, "and heads lay all over the ground.") Though exceedingly well written, Denby's portrait of the great "Dot Con" generally echoes the sentiments of other, similarly themed books about the period. The work is more appealing when Denby focuses on himself: he had nearly suffered a nervous breakdown when his wife of 18 years left him, and making enough money to buy out her share of their apartment was his initial motivation for investing in the market. Denby brutally details his decline, from a night of impotence to an affair with a married woman, then a six-month obsession with Internet porn-harrowing stuff for a New Yorker staff writer. His dissection of his own Upper West Side narcissism offers some of the most candid critiques of the Manhattan bourgeoisie ever found outside of a Woody Allen film. More of Denby, and less of the Nasdaq, would have made this good book even better. (Jan.) Forecast: A print advertising campaign; print, radio and TV interviews; and a five-city author tour will target mid-lifers who will relate to Denby's experiences of anxiety and encroaching age. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Denby, a film critic for The New Yorker and author of the best-selling memoir Great Books, has written an aptly titled cautionary tale about playing the stock markets and losing big time. Facing financial difficulties in 2000, he focused his energies on investing with the aim of making a "million dollars." To that end, he obsessively watched CNBC, became conversant with the day-to-day workings of the markets, followed up on investing tips, amassed a portfolio of mostly speculative tech stocks, and hobnobbed with the likes of Sam Waksal and Henry Blodget. He had become (in his words) "the momentum investor who loads up on a hot market sector." Then the inevitable happened: the bubble popped and his investments tanked. While the author's credentials as a film critic are impressive, his personal narrative rationalizing his kamikaze-like investing behavior is neither terribly original nor sympathetic, as the story has been told many times before and with more success. Denby comes across as just another unlucky, disillusioned investor who is poorer but wiser at the end of his tale. Not recommended; for a much more satisfying explanation of how the stock market bubble collapsed in 2000, look to John Cassidy, another New Yorker writer, who provides the best analysis in his exemplary Dot.con. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 9/15/03.]-Richard Drezen, "Washington Post," New York City Bureau Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

AudioFile

What happens when a middle-aged journalist not only invests heavily in the stock market but goes through a divorce and numerous rebounds as well? He writes American Sucker, a funny, sometimes touching exposé of his own foibles and misunderstandings of market lore and himself—before and after the dot-com bubble burst. Be prepared for a long listen, ably voiced by Dennis Boutsikaris, who is well cast as the voice of the disgruntled author. Denby's ramblings are bolstered by real-life anecdotes of brushes with the now incarcerated Sam Wachsal and his ilk. A bonfire of the vanities for the ears. D.J.B. © AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

A seismic disturbance rocks New Yorker film critic Denby's life, and he turns for security, Lord help him, to the stock market of early 2000. But money proves godless, and the experience moves the earth under his feet as dreadfully as the dissolution of his marriage. Even with the portents, the breakup of Denby's marriage to novelist Cathleen Schine shook him like a rag doll. As things fell apart, he decided "to make money, serious money . . . so I could hold on to something very important to me," most especially, the family's longtime apartment on the Upper West Side, a place that anchored his memories and self. Thanks to the "giddy boom-times," the market value of the place had reached $1.4 million. Now, Denby figured $1 million was what he needed to buy out his wife's half interest. With the dumb, incredulous headshake of retrospect, he artfully explains his excursion into the tech stocks of millennium's turn. But Denby is no dummy, his twitchy owlishness trying to make sense of the market, which was open to so many influences, from drab to berserk, at a time when value had no relation to earnings. Misgivings rode him like barbarians; he sought reassurance in the words and company of Sam Waskal and Henry Blodget and George Gilder, crooning visionary ecstasies that snookered him into ImClone and Corvis as they called up the philosophical and ethical implications of greed as motivation and perversion. A free-falling market forced him to consider "that our great system of democratic capitalism was just fine as long as things were going well for you," and that "in a society like ours, which has so few communal instincts, the normal tragedies of life-losing a partner, losing a job-hurt muchmore than they should." Stock market aside, Denby recounts his ungainly forays into romance, his disgruntlement with cinema, and the solace of time slowed to a human scale with his sons. For those who felt Denby lost some of the bounce in his step when he moved from New York to the New Yorker, here he is again in full, anxious, exegetic stride.

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

Walter Isaacson