THERE’S A VACANT seat on the judging panel for the FT/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award, and I’m putting myself forward as a fill in.
Lloyd Blankfein, the head of Goldman Sachs, has opted out this year because most of the books in contention are about him – or the banking crisis he and his mates helped create.
The award is one of the most valuable in the business book trade. The winner walks off with a £30,000 (around €36,440) cheque and those making the shortlist receive £10,000 (around €12,150) for turning up in New York for the awards. These numbers alone make book publishers, agents and authors sit up and listen. Many of the entrants I’ve read already – and some are very good indeed.
If I was taking Blankfein's place, I'd be pressing for Andrew Ross Sorkin's inside account – Too Big To Fail– and Michael Lewis' The Big Short. Like the other books on the list, both are non-fiction accounts, extensively researched, which offer to bring the reader "in the room" at the big moments. Here's Ross Sorkin on the morning after Jamie Dimon (chief executive of JP Morgan Chase) attended a meeting at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York with a dozen of his rival Wall Street chief executives. Their assignment was to come up with a plan to save Lehman Brothers, the nation's fourth-largest investment bank – or risk the collateral damage that might ensue in the markets.
“Standing in the kitchen of his Park Avenue apartment, Jamie Dimon poured himself a cup of coffee, hoping it might ease his headache. He was recovering from a slight hangover, but his head really hurt for a different reason: He knew too much.”
It’s this novelistic style that marks both Sorkin and Lewis as direct descendants of the new journalism movement, given prominence by writers such as Tom Wolfe, Hunter S Thompson and Joan Didion in the 1960s and 1970s.
Huge events such as the banking crisis are so compelling and the people who drive them so cartoonish that it recalls Philip Roth’s phrase: “The actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures daily that are the envy of any novelist’’.
When Andrew Ross Sorkin can write about what is in the head of a Wall Street bank chief executive as he pours coffee on a Saturday morning, the same question arises now that Roth was making in 1961: What is the point of fiction?
Sitting on the beach this summer, I read what felt like at least part of an answer. The Financial Lives of Poetsby Jess Walter has taken some of the big business and technology themes of the day and nailed them.
The main character, Matt Prior, is a business journalist (ahem) who loses his job as his newspaper crumbles in the face of the rise of the internet and the fall of advertising revenue. The banking crisis is the context for the loss of his house and the break-up of his marriage. His wife spends her evenings upstairs on Facebook while he goes in search of work. His kids are jettisoned from private education in favour of “Baghdad High School”. His father sits in front of the TV, unable to distinguish between sport on ESPN and the financial news on CNBC. Both are dominated by bimbos and airheads trolling out inane garbage, as numbers fly past at the bottom of the screen.
Like all journalists, he has a great, big money-making idea, one that will use his contacts and writing skill to bring in a fortune. Unfortunately, his big idea is terrible – financial analysis via the medium of poetry – and his redundancy money is blown.
What this description doesn’t tell you is that it’s one of the funniest books I’ve read in ages. And it very nearly made me cry with recognition (I am a bit susceptible to this sort of thing: by the end of Toy Story 3 my 3D glasses were like leaky swimming goggles).
It's this emotional connection that sets Walter's book apart from the FT/Goldman Sachs list of the best non-fiction around. None of those made me laugh very much, or want to cry. They took me into the room, but didn't touch me emotionally, beyond sheer anger at the incompetent and morally bankrupt bankers. The Financial Lives of Poetsdoesn't offer any solutions, or a critique of the causes of the crisis. But it's pretty good at assessing its effects, not on the macro economy, but on the lives of real-sounding people.
By making his story up, Jess Walter has told the truth, perhaps in a way to which even the very best non-fiction authors can only aspire.
