American Sucker

By: Alex Gallo-Brown

Rarely do we look to film critics — reviewers of popular entertainment, after all — for prophecy or wisdom, and yet it is remarkable, in reading American Sucker — New Yorker critic David Denby’s 2004 account of his own brief, disastrous obsession with the stock market — how prescient it feels now.

Granted, the book was published only five years ago, not twenty-five. But it is striking how fluidly the details of one financial crisis — the tech bubble of 2000-2002 that so mesmerized Denby — might be substituted for the more recent sub-prime mortgage fiasco that has affected us all. It is almost impossible, reading the book now, not to feel a twinge of outrage. Back then, Denby knew the outcome of a free market taken to its logical extreme. He set it out in print for all of us to see, and yet we did nothing to change our behavior.

At the time of the book’s writing, Denby had been a successful film critic for more than thirty years — first with New York magazine and then The New Yorker. As a young man, his approach to life had been a simple one: “Find something you were good at, something that gave you pleasure and was useful to others, and then discover a way to make a decent living out of it.” In 1999, at 56, Denby had achieved these goals and then some. He was one of the most respected film critics in the country, a staff writer for its most prestigious culture magazine; he owned an apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan; he was a husband and a father.

That year, however, after his wife, the novelist Cathleen Schine, requested a separation, Denby discovered how feeble the supports of such a life can be.

“I saw what many others have said,” he writes, “that our great system of democratic capitalism was just fine, as long as things were going well for you. The security it provided, however, was thin, and once you fell through the crust, you were in danger of falling a long way.”

Soon, Denby found himself in discussions to sell his beloved apartment so as to finance smaller, individual places for him and his wife. The couples they used to socialize with had begun to shy away, viewing him as something of a pariah. The whole fabric of his formerly stolid domestic and social life verged on dissolution.

To make matters worse, there was no burgeoning film movement to throw his critical weight behind.

“Movies were fading as popular art,” wrote Denby, “splitting dangerously into spangled spectacles for the malls and earnest little art films for the class audiences.”

This profession he had chosen all those years ago — this thing that gave him pleasure — how useful was it anymore, anyway, and to whom?

Confronted with such personal and professional doubts, Denby decided to indulge an incipient passion for playing the stock market — and for the surging but volatile tech stocks, in particular — under the delusion he’d make enough money to buy his wife out of the apartment. American Sucker is a document of that obsession.

For middle class Americans, circa 2000 and 2001, fervently following the stock market with religious-type fervor was hardly aberrant behavior — it was almost the norm. Newspaper columns, television shows, whole magazines were devoted to the market, and it wasn’t just cutthroat capitalists who were playing either — it was college professors and film critics too.

“The change was not just financial, it was cultural,” Denby wrote. “Liberals like me had watched with surprise as their residual distaste for capitalism had slipped away, turning to grudging tolerance, and then, by degrees, to outright admiration.”

Wealth, in the boom times of the late ’90s and early ’00s, must have seemed almost palpable to Denby and people like him. It didn’t grow on trees, but it did bloom dependably in bank accounts and mutual funds and stock portfolios. As Denby wrote, “Wealth no longer appeared, to a great many Americans, as a rare goal pursued through entrepreneurial skill or achieved through extraordinary luck. No, in the late ’90s, wealth was almost an entitlement.”

For an aging film critic, devastated by the loss of his life partner, the market must have appeared as the perfect jungle to get lost in for a while. “Following the zipper,” as Denby called it, was a habit as compulsive as pornography — another addiction Denby tries on briefly for size before discarding it — but with enough intellectual pizazz to sate his considerable appetite for ideas.

Throughout the book, there runs a current of yearning, a kind of self-conscious desire to step in line with the cool crowd — to affiliate with the hip, young investors and entrepreneurs, these energetic but elusive people who seemed to have it all figured out. Mired in the middle-age of a life devoted to the arts, Denby had begun to wonder if maybe, all those years ago, he had chosen the wrong team. What was so wrong with wealth, anyway, he now asked himself. Wasn’t, in fact, some greed good — an engine of growth, for society as well as the individual? Was his reflexive aversion to luxury, to materiality, misguided on some level, or at least passe?

These are the essential questions of the book — ones that Denby investigates with predictable rigor. His New Yorker cachet enables him an audience with such prominent figures as Henry Blodgett, a celebrated Merrill Lynch financial analyst; Sam Waksal, a charismatic biotechnologist with a penchant for hosting luxurious, star-studded dinner parties at his SoHo loft; and George Gilder, a former Reaganite-turned-tech-proselytizer who now delivered eerie sermons about a world so intricately connected, no time would ever be wasted.

Denby, investing in these men’s companies and ideas, also invested — especially in the case of Waksal — in their friendships.

“I reached for the future,” writes Denby, “not just to get rich, but to make the most of my time and avoid the sentence of nullity hanging over me. I hoped that Sam Waksal and Henry Blodgett and rhapsodical George Gilder, too, would lead me to that place where we would steal time from the end and not get any older.”

It is at this point in the book that we begin to understand that the subject of Denby’s book isn’t really the market, despite its repeated posturing in that direction. (The least interesting parts in the book, in fact, are the ones that catalogue the strategies and vagaries of investing.) Denby’s primary subject is mortality and the lengths one will go to avoid confronting one’s own; the way in which the market — “the quintessence of instability in the Information Age, the perfect paradigm of life as ceaseless change,” as Denby calls it — serves as a convenient escape from this unpleasant fact. Subsidiary subjects include grief — that necessary process that follows losing one’s lifelong partner — and the nature, the morality or immorality, of greed.

The latter issue is the most complex for Denby, the most irreconcilable. “My thoughts on greed had become a tangle,” he writes late in the book. To help sort them out — a la Great Books, Denby’s 1997 study of the Western Classics — he first calls on the novelist Edith Wharton.

From the example of Undine Spragg, a character in Wharton’s 1913 novel, The Custom of the Country, Denby learns that greed, at its worst, is “a fixed quality, like an unappeasable sexual perversion,” and that once afflicted, “there is no cure for this condition, no resting place, no promise of ease and satiety in the future.”

But this is only greed taken to its extreme form, according to Denby. Since he is an unrepentant capitalist, he believes that “money hunger is necessary for hard work and its recognition,” and “the desire for money sharpens the appetite for life, particularly in middle-age.”

Following this logic, it is not the desire for wealth on its own that is wholly condemnable; it is that greed is self-perpetuating and self-promoting by nature, that eventually it becomes an end in itself, corrupting and destroying the individual capacity for love and human relationships. There are reasons, after all, why greed was included as one of the seven deadly sins, and one of those reasons is the corroding effect on the individual’s relationship to time.

In his recent Los Angeles Times essay, “The Lost Art of Reading,” David Ulin quotes the French philosopher Simone Weil: “One must believe in the reality of time. Otherwise, one is just dreaming.”

Explains Ulin, “Without time, we lose a sense of narrative, the most essential connection to who we are. We live in time; we understand ourselves in relation to it, but in our culture, time collapses into an ever-present now.”

This echoes Denby, whose compulsive obsession with the “ceaseless change” of the stock market had caused him to lose track of his own narrative. Tuned in to the talking heads on CNBC, to the incessantly coiling ticker in Times Square, to the legions of websites and magazines and newspapers devoted to market gossip and speculation, Denby had almost vanished from his own life altogether.

In 2002, the tech bubble burst, of course, and Denby, like thousands of other “casual” investors, lost hundreds of thousands of dollars. There were ramifications for the rich and powerful too: Henry Blodgett, the analyst, was sued, successfully, for illicitly inflating the ratings of certain stocks; Sam Waksal, the charismatic cancer researcher, was imprisoned in the same insider trading scandal that brought down Martha Stewart; and George Gilder, the former prophet, was nearly ruined, relegated to sniping bitterly about the evils of big government in the pages of the investor magazine he put out himself.

Gilder’s vision had been of a society so meticulously, inextricably connected that people would be “liberated” from unproductive “leisure activities” like watching movies or playing ball. Sophisticated wireless networks — which would be sold and marketed by Gilder, of course — would enable people to plug into the market constantly; the result would be a “release of entrepreneurial energy…more morally edifying than the leisure diversions that many imagine to be the end and meaning of life.” In Gilder’s vision of society, people would be able to work all the time.

“I reject this utopia utterly,” countered Denby in 2004. “Obviously, it’s a nightmare. In the modern world, time was the point, all right — not saving it, but expending it opulently, with the maximum sensuous unfolding of pleasure.”

Even after coming to his senses — it seemed he had chosen the right team after all — after having lost a not-so-small fortune and his beloved apartment too, Denby felt himself, almost against his will, pulled in opposing directions.

“I wanted the slower, gracious life,” he writes in the book’s penultimate chapter, “and I was also drawn to the life made possible by technology and entrepreneurial hustle and greed, which both excited and frightened me at the same time. I would always want both. There was no resolution — there couldn’t be — not for any of us, we Americans. But at least I was ready to move on. I would die, and knowing that, I would live more slowly and more happily, filling time as best as I could, one moment after another, in a chain of pleasure that would last as long as I could forge one link to the next.”