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The Gods Of Greenwich (2011)

by Norb Vonnegut(Favorite Author)

3.45 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

0312384696 (ISBN13: 9780312384692)

languge

English

genre

Fiction

publisher

Minotaur Books

review 1: I got the book because it was about hedge funds and shorting stock -- two concepts I've struggled to really understand. After reading the book, I do feel I've got a much better handle on hedge funds, why they are being blamed for the financial crisis of our day, and also agree with the need to put more checks and balances in place. The story line is pretty good and it was an enjoyable way to learn about this stuff!
review 2: I bought this book as I live in Greenwich and have spent years working in financial services. So curiosity got the better of me concering what Vonnegut would do with his rich subject matter. I have seen more than my fair share of driven, materialistic, egomaniacs flaunting their vast wealth vainly among the profilic Maseratis and mansions... more of Greenwich. Conspicuous consumption may well have been invented here. Ayn Rand is alive, well and much too revered in Greenwich. If a hedge fund manager were any kind of a god, it would be properly a Narcissus like Cy Leeser. I admire the grasp that Vonnegut has of the inside track in the hedge fund world and of the market forces which drive global investing. I was intrigued by the highly inventive "secret sauce" he prescribed in the hedge fund model of Cy Leeser. Vonnegut's style is a traditional, straight-ahead, omniscient narrative favoring terse sentences and the craftmanship of the book is certainly presentable as a mainstream thriller. I enjoyed his characters and found myself intrigued by what happened to them. I intensely disliked the villainous Cy Leeser of whom I have known many and admired the noble Cusack. The dialogue among the characters was taut and credible -- I loved the immortally witty quotes of Dorothy Parker. His portraits of Greenwich seemed somewhat hyperbolic in places -- my wife works in Two Greenwich Plaza at the old school, law firm to which he refers. He missed out on the real beauty of Greenwich in the beaches and shore on Long Island Sound in which its residents revel. The novel seemed rather real until the surreal denouement which was, frankly, a tad absurd even for a thriller in which I was willing to suspend generously my sense of disbelief because I enjoyed the characters. The novel seemed somewhat of a shallow dive in places but I grant that its theme does deal with the artifice, vanity and ultimately the absurdly chauvinistic pursuit of wealth, which is an excellent theme. I did very much become immersed in this novel until the last 30 pages when the author just lost me in the story line. I was disappointed because I had become invested in the characters. I did find Cusack inspiring and he struck me as a sort of Wall Street Odysseus because of his resourcefulness and gift for decisive action. It's definitely an original novel and I picked up some new perspective on the Crash of 2008. This is not great literature, folks -- it's simply a beach book with a fair amount of entertainment value if you enjoy Wall Street thrillers. No new literary invention in the writing, no great literary contribution, no transformational epiphanies, no literary awards forthcoming, I suspect. The book is selling quite well because of its broad appeal on a hot topic. This novel will have little enduring literary value and I did not wish that I had written it. I started to read "Top Producer" after finishing "GOG" but lost interest early on in that novel also because of excesses in the story line at the outset. This is the sort of novel that America loves to read at the beach: if you're heading there this summer, you may want to take a copy with you for its entertainment value. Sorry, I wanted to like this book more but honestly it was just asking too much -- subjectively, there was simply too much artifice and too little art for my taste. less

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