A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism, by Peter Mountford

Peter Mountford has written a novel which deals with a subject matter under-represented in fiction: the world of finance. This opens up a Pandora’s box of motifs, including segues into economic theory, the figure of an anti-hero who at times is thoroughly unlikable, and a curious fictional landscape where morality depends not just on who is speaking, but on who wants what.

The novel is a sort of Bildungsroman, charting the psychological and moral development of its young protagonist, Gabriel de Boya who finds employment with The Calloway Group, a shady hedge fund. Enticed by a colleague into the world of international finance and pressured by the successes of his peers, Gabriel takes an assignment in Bolivia, also his mother’s native country, to prove his worth to the hedge fund managers. The job entails operating undercover as a free-lance journalist, and this initial deceit sets off a web of lies which unfold as the story progresses. Gabriel finds himself quickly over his head in this new world as the boy toy of an older and jaded journalist for the Wall Street Journal, Gloria, and as he gropes about in search of the illusive insider information his employers are seeking to increase the funds dividends.

This search entails seeking out information about Bolivia’s president elect, Evo Morales, and the political leaders surrounding him. While he bumbles around the world of journalism, and Gloria, Gabriel finds himself hopelessly groping for information amongst more experienced journalists while striving to maintain a sense of competency to his hedge fund manager, Priya Singh in New York. The quest begins with the question of whether or not Morales will keep good on his campaign promises to nationalize Bolivia’s major industries, a question promising large profits for the hedge fund if known. From here he serendipitously meets Lenka, Morales’ press attaché, and begins dating her. A feeling of mutual distrust- but also attraction shapes the remaining story and leads to its denouement.

A narrative flashback reveals that Gabriel had studied in Bolivia while attending Brown University, and the younger protagonist notes that “The United States was actually a very bizarre place. Elsewhere in the world, the unattainability of great fame and fortune was more readily accepted, and so life was less driven by grandiose fantasies.” This observation arises out of the contrast between life in Bolivia and back home, and though it sparks a revelation in the young economics student, he soon finds a tentative justification to these fantasies in economic theory. Following the study abroad episode is a brief discussion involving the concept of utility, the economists working term for joy, which is maximized by the intake of money. This connection between utility, and hence joy, and money, becomes the philosophical foundation to the figure of Gabriel: “people want to be pleased, and they do not want to be displeased.”

These apparent digressions serve interesting aesthetic purposes. They illuminate the mind of our protagonist and also the not so fictional world he inhabits. They are also well timed. At a crucial moment in the story, Gabriel’s web of lies threatens to become unmanageable. He is on the brink of getting fired from the Calloway group for failing to produce anything of worth, his budding love affair with Lenka is in peril from cheating with Gloria, and he has lied about his true employer to his mother who has come to Bolivia to visit him. This moment is marked by a discussion on game theory and the prisoner’s dilemma, a schema meant to be prescriptive of how a rational agent should act. In a situation where two inmates are being interrogated and encouraged to rat the other out, a table can be drawn up as a sort of spread sheet of the pay offs or outcomes: if prisoner A rats out prisoner B, prisoner A will get off with a light sentence, but the catch is that if prisoner B also rats out prisoner A they both will get heavy sentences. Such lines of reasoning then become the blueprints for Gabriel’s paranoid induced calculations on what dangers he is facing if he gets fired, his mother finds out abut his real job or Lenka blows his cover which she might do if she finds out he has cheated on her, and so on- which serves to show not only Gabriel’s sticky situation, but the status of rationality itself in a world that is itself quite sticky.

The figure of Gabriel himself is interesting in that he manages to revolt and interest the reader at the same time. Gabriel is obnoxiously un-charming with his lady friends- he manages to turn every flirtatious episode into an awkward embarrassment, and by the narrator’s own admission, is attracted to women who are simply stronger than he is- since he is so completely emasculated and ineffectual this would seem indeed to be a requirement, if for nothing more than the alternative being hard to picture.
In almost every situation Gabriel fumbles- he is wimpy before the Bolivian machismo on display at lenka’s home on Christmas, he sees through the American dream on an intellectual level but caves into the desire to keep up with his ivy-league peers, he is so utterly lacking in virility his passion is expressed by his desire for money- which he finds, as a sin, greed, is simply a passion like gluttony or lust- but more pure- or in Gabriel’s case what amount to his version of purity- abstract.

In Mountford’s hands, however, Gabriel’s lack of appeal seems justified in light of the novel’s superb construction. Like Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov, Mountford’s Gabriel is more of a man of the idea, who in testing it, sacrifices his love life, possible jail time, and even his mother’s respect. The novel makes use of theoretical ideas in economics to create a richly satisfying portrait of post modern living and the whimsical nature of society and morality. Perhaps the ultimate achievement of this work is as an examination into the impossibility of reconciling the demands of those around us as loved ones, employers and family members, the illusory nature of human desire, and the inevitability of cold hard (quantifiable) cash in the absence of rationality.

~By Staff Writer, Benjamin Boyce