Say what you will about David Denby, at least he doesn’t pick his nose and eat it. We can make this postulation with a fair degree of confidence for the simple fact that, were he to engage in such behavior, he would almost certainly write about it. Denby is the sort of memoirist who believes that every personal action must be revealed and examined, no matter how repellent (or mundane).
Thus, fourteen pages into American Sucker (Denby’s second memoir; his first, Great Books, chronicled his return to Columbia University at the age of 46 to reexamine the works of Western Civilization) we are treated to Denby’s brief-but-harrowing addiction to Internet pornography. Denby being Denby, this revelation is naturally accompanied by a disquisition on how Plato, Hegel, and Nietzsche might judge these activities, which is either comically self-important or one of the most ingenious meta-commentaries on masturbation we’ve come across in some time. Then, on page 53, Denby informs us of his inability to fall asleep without a cocktail of Xanax and NyQuil, the latter described as a “slimy, licorice-tasting liquid that provided an instant of nausea” (hey, Dave, they also make it in cherry, which goes down much easier). Incidents of impotence, acts of adultery, and even an extensive paragraph on his upset stomach and the successful treatment thereof (Tums and a bowel movement, if you’re scoring at home) follow on with depressing regularity. It gets so predictable that when Denby writes “I climbed into a king-sized bed, but I was unable to sleep,” the reader speculates on which of two possible remedies will be employed to meet the challenge: self-love or over-the-counter cold medication?
Ostensibly an account of its author’s debacle on the rocky shoals of the New Economy, American Sucker seeks to place Denby in the role of the crash’s Everyman, in which he is swept up in the mass delusion of a never-ending expansion, then treated badly by the manipulative hedge-fund managers and stock analysts who withheld vital information or flat-out lied to the stock-buying public in a desperate attempt to keep the money flowing. Never mind that the average investor lacked both Denby’s loss-padding book deal and his personal access to the era’s key financial gurus (he lunches with Merrill Lynch stock evaluator Henry Blodget, dines with ImClone CEO Sam Waskal, and even scores a meeting with SEC Chair Arthur Levitt, Jr.). While briefly acknowledging the advantages he holds over his fellow losers, Denby still offers the grandly condescending hope that “some aspects of my behavior will inspire self- recognition…” Well, okay, maybe masturbating to the Internet rings a bell.
American Sucker is a book that inspires sorrow, pity, and ultimately anger, but mostly for the reader who has to endure it. Dilatory, repetitive, and endlessly self-reflective (Denby cannot pass a street corner in New York without recalling how, six months earlier, he was on the same street corner, no doubt remembering an even earlier visitation at that identical location), the memoir meanders through the author’s divorce and what could charitably be called a midlife crisis. Denby wanders from tech conference to tech conference, willfully blinding himself to the glaring signs of impending market doom, and while he certainly wasn’t alone in this regard, it doesn’t speak well for Columbia University that an individual who passed through its marble halls twice could be so infuriatingly stupid. He searches for philosophical certainty and understanding, but ends up offering bootless profundities that are hard enough to read, let alone understand. (“Time, properly speaking, has no volume, no body; it has no speed.”) Inspired by the long-dreaded loss of his home—tragically, he was forced to move from a large Upper West Side apartment to a somewhat smaller one a few blocks away—Denby ventures into a bizarre extended metaphor concerning casual china (“When a teacup cracks, one thinks of death”), at which point the reader wishes this guy would just buy a red sports car and get over it already. (He does, in fact, spend several pages mooning over the Audi A6—whether this is simple automotive lust or a desire to demonstrate his understanding of Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class is an open question.)
The low point—and in a book that shamelessly posits the “practical limit on greed” to be two homes and $5 million in liquid assets, that’s saying something—comes in a chapter titled, simply, “September 11, 2001.” The attentive reader, having felt rising dread as the chronology moves ever closer to that date, is compelled to read on, if only to see how Denby can take the nation’s darkest day and yoke it to his favorite subject (Denby). True to form, Denby suggests that one of the ways to combat Islamic fundamentalism would be to, well, send Denby overseas to “make the case for secularism, for free speech, for transparency… Who better than me?” Who indeed? Sadly, after deciding that such an endeavor is not to be, Denby at least vows that he will no longer “be quite as passive as I was before September 11.” Thus is born another knowledgeable investor.
Denby is not a terrible writer; he’s not even a terrible thinker. There are flashes of insight here, but they’re so few and far between as to make the reader crave the next nauseous self-revelation, or something meretricious to add the vital spark to an otherwise sluggish flow of detail. (A chapter devoted to the physical workings of fiber-optic cable is sure to try the patience of even the most determined reader.) At one point, venting his anger at the corporate malfeasors whose actions directly affected his portfolio, Denby rails, “Some of the insiders stole from us—from ordinary shareholders, and in some cases from employees, too. They stole from me.” The reader, having lost countless hours to the writer’s ceaseless examination of the writer’s navel, can finally feel some empathy. After all, we’re victims too.
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