Hanging With the Hedge-Fund Bros to Get the Story
To research his new novel, ‘Lake Success,’ about a hedge-fund manager who loses everything, Gary Shteyngart spent four years among players in high finance
As characters in fiction, hedge-fund managers deliver high returns.
“There’s a gigantic flair to everything they do, almost like they’re living in a Russian novel,” said Gary Shteyngart, whose book out Tuesday, “Lake Success,” follows the manager of a $2.4 billion fund.
The novel joins a long list of books, movies and TV shows featuring financial executives whose ambition and wealth have allowed writers to examine tricky questions. How do the rich choose to use their power? What do they do with troubles that cash can’t fix? And how much money is enough?
Mr. Shteyngart sought the answers by removing his lead character, Barry Cohen, from the New York hedge-fund world and sending him across the country on a Greyhound bus—a journey the middle-aged antihero makes as his hedge fund collapses, an SEC investigation closes in on him and his marriage implodes. On the trip, he ditches his cellphone and credit cards, bringing with him little more than his luxury-watch collection, a complimentary vest from Citibank and dreams of an old girlfriend in El Paso, Texas.
Hanging With the Hedge-Fund Bros to Get the Story
To create the character of Barry, the author spent four years interviewing hedge-fund managers and others in finance. He flew on their private jets and went to their parties. He got so drunk with a group of young bankers that his wife had to help him unbutton his shirt when he got home at 4 a.m.
The 46-year-old New Yorker, a Russian immigrant who wrote about his family’s move from Leningrad to Queens in his 2014 memoir “Little Failure,” heavily researches his novels. He dove into the tech world for his 2010 dystopian bestseller “Super Sad True Love Story” and investigated the oil industry for “Absurdistan,” his 2006 work set in a fictional oil-rich former Soviet republic.
Some characters in “Lake Success” are based on combinations of many people, he said, but there is no one inspiration for Barry.
The executives Mr. Shteyngart met made and lost a lot of money during his research from 2012 to 2016. At low points, some sources—unnamed in the book’s acknowledgments—shared their emotional roller coaster with him. “They felt a lot of hatred toward investors. ‘Why can’t they see the long-term picture? They’re so fickle,’ ” he said. “There was a huge change in their perception of themselves.”
When he asked executives to explain a successful competitor’s underlying motivation, he said, the responses could be biting. “They would say, ‘His wife doesn’t really love him,’ ‘His mother never loved him enough,’ ‘His children really hate him.’ ” Mr. Shteyngart went on: “So many of them were missing fundamental pieces of themselves, and the money was supposed to fill in for those pieces.”
In the novel, almost every aspect of Barry’s life circles back to finance. “Barry was a Republican, but he had been long gay marriage since third quarter 2014,” Mr. Shteyngart writes, using investment lingo to convey his character’s support for the cause. A drug dealer with potential is “an undervalued stock.” A well-preserved college sweetheart and her family are declared “investment-grade.” And proof of Barry’s personal re-awakening: “He didn’t email. He didn’t Bloomberg. He didn’t stay up for the Asian markets.”
This world is populated by the 110-pound hedge-fund wife “with the knuckly shoulders and the retroussé nose” and the mother worried about a school’s HYPMS entrance rates (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT, Stanford) for her pre-K child. For these hedge-fund titans, the occasional public meltdown is a rite of passage, just “like your first ankle monitor bracelet or your fourth divorce.”
The book’s minor characters continue Mr. Shteyngart’s filleting of the one percent. When employee Jeff Park makes a costly spreadsheet error, he passes out at his desk in horror. Later, he collects data about the women he dates. “Well, there’s some variance,” he says of their 5-foot-6-inch average height. “Maybe half a sigma.”
For the bus scenes, Mr. Shteyngart rode the Greyhound all day and scribbled notes at night in whatever hotel or motel was closest to the bus station. After those stints on what he dubs “The Hound,” he flew home first class on air miles.
In the novel, Barry leaves his family after his young son is diagnosed with autism. Mr. Shteyngart, who is married with a 4-year-old son, said he learned about the disorder from friends whose families were grappling with the diagnosis. Barry himself may be on the spectrum. Struggling with social interactions as a child, he stands in front of a mirror for hours practicing opening lines and follow-up retorts so he can talk to the other boys at school.
“I think that’s where I put some of myself in there,” Mr. Shteyngart said, recalling his difficulties not speaking English as a poorer student at a generally wealthy school. “I had no social cues. I was always trying to figure out, ‘What’s the code?’ It took me until college to figure it out.”
His latest novel has some people asking him for financial advice—a development the author calls “a scary, scary thing.” In reply, he quotes from his research. “Some of the coolest guys I’ve ever met in this industry say, ‘Let me tell you a secret, Gary: low-cost index funds,’ ” he said. “They’re like, ‘Don’t invest in our stuff. Just low-cost index funds.’ ”