American Sucker by David Denby

From the Publisher

In this Bracingly Honest, Page-Turning Memoir, what begins as a manic money chase-desperate to hang on to his home after his marriage breaks up. David Denby realizes he can buy out his wife's share only if he can first make a killing in the stock market-ultimately becomes an unforgettable encounter with such eternal issues as envy, love, death, sanity, and happiness. American Sucker is a singularly compelling tale of the high-tech bubble related not by a market guru or an investment professional but by a witty, perceptive, and eloquent outsider.

The New York Times

Above all, this is a book about desire, not only for handsome material wealth and a comfortable, familiar home, but for love, sex, fame, fine objects (namely, a shining blue Audi sports sedan that functions as Denby's mechanical Helen, seductively beckoning him toward catastrophe and putting him on the wrong side of the old gods) and even aesthetic pleasure. In sketching his own intensely crosshatched character, so ripe for exploitation by Wall Street hucksters who played on his heady hopes about the market while suavely anesthetizing his intestinal doubts, Denby the critic reveals his tricky feelings about the movies he makes his living writing about. Mostly they disappoint him, deeply, chronically, and the soulless industrial process that creates them outrages his lofty sensibilities; but at the same time he's realistic enough to know that without the underlying profit motive the screen would go dark. Denby strikes a worldly compromise, meticulously sifting through the dreck for big-budget films that also succeed as art, then aggressively, sincerely promoting them. The system depresses him, but the system is all he has. — Walter Kirn

Publishers Weekly

"I wanted to be wealthy," Denby bluntly admits near the end of this absorbing memoir of the dot-com boom and bust. "I didn't make it." Like millions of other amateur investors in 2000 and 2001, Denby (Great Books) was swept along by greed, by the nearly messianic belief that the stock market offered easy opportunities for unlimited prosperity. Denby sunk hundreds of thousands of dollars into the Nasdaq, digested unhealthy amounts of CNBC and the Wall Street Journal and forged friendships with some of the era's brightest stars (and, later, its most public criminals). He lost his balance in the excess of the time-stock tickers in strip clubs; parties at executives' lofts-and then lost his money when the market crashed. ("The ax had swung," Denby writes, "and heads lay all over the ground.") Though exceedingly well written, Denby's portrait of the great "Dot Con" generally echoes the sentiments of other, similarly themed books about the period. The work is more appealing when Denby focuses on himself: he had nearly suffered a nervous breakdown when his wife of 18 years left him, and making enough money to buy out her share of their apartment was his initial motivation for investing in the market. Denby brutally details his decline, from a night of impotence to an affair with a married woman, then a six-month obsession with Internet porn-harrowing stuff for a New Yorker staff writer. His dissection of his own Upper West Side narcissism offers some of the most candid critiques of the Manhattan bourgeoisie ever found outside of a Woody Allen film. More of Denby, and less of the Nasdaq, would have made this good book even better. (Jan.) Forecast: A print advertising campaign; print, radio and TV interviews; and a five-city author tour will target mid-lifers who will relate to Denby's experiences of anxiety and encroaching age. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Denby, a film critic for The New Yorker and author of the best-selling memoir Great Books, has written an aptly titled cautionary tale about playing the stock markets and losing big time. Facing financial difficulties in 2000, he focused his energies on investing with the aim of making a "million dollars." To that end, he obsessively watched CNBC, became conversant with the day-to-day workings of the markets, followed up on investing tips, amassed a portfolio of mostly speculative tech stocks, and hobnobbed with the likes of Sam Waksal and Henry Blodget. He had become (in his words) "the momentum investor who loads up on a hot market sector." Then the inevitable happened: the bubble popped and his investments tanked. While the author's credentials as a film critic are impressive, his personal narrative rationalizing his kamikaze-like investing behavior is neither terribly original nor sympathetic, as the story has been told many times before and with more success. Denby comes across as just another unlucky, disillusioned investor who is poorer but wiser at the end of his tale. Not recommended; for a much more satisfying explanation of how the stock market bubble collapsed in 2000, look to John Cassidy, another New Yorker writer, who provides the best analysis in his exemplary Dot.con. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 9/15/03.]-Richard Drezen, "Washington Post," New York City Bureau Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A seismic disturbance rocks New Yorker film critic Denby's life, and he turns for security, Lord help him, to the stock market of early 2000. But money proves godless, and the experience moves the earth under his feet as dreadfully as the dissolution of his marriage. Even with the portents, the breakup of Denby's marriage to novelist Cathleen Schine shook him like a rag doll. As things fell apart, he decided "to make money, serious money . . . so I could hold on to something very important to me," most especially, the family's longtime apartment on the Upper West Side, a place that anchored his memories and self. Thanks to the "giddy boom-times," the market value of the place had reached $1.4 million. Now, Denby figured $1 million was what he needed to buy out his wife's half interest. With the dumb, incredulous headshake of retrospect, he artfully explains his excursion into the tech stocks of millennium's turn. But Denby is no dummy, his twitchy owlishness trying to make sense of the market, which was open to so many influences, from drab to berserk, at a time when value had no relation to earnings. Misgivings rode him like barbarians; he sought reassurance in the words and company of Sam Waskal and Henry Blodget and George Gilder, crooning visionary ecstasies that snookered him into ImClone and Corvis as they called up the philosophical and ethical implications of greed as motivation and perversion. A free-falling market forced him to consider "that our great system of democratic capitalism was just fine as long as things were going well for you," and that "in a society like ours, which has so few communal instincts, the normal tragedies of life-losing a partner, losing a job-hurt muchmore than they should." Stock market aside, Denby recounts his ungainly forays into romance, his disgruntlement with cinema, and the solace of time slowed to a human scale with his sons. For those who felt Denby lost some of the bounce in his step when he moved from New York to the New Yorker, here he is again in full, anxious, exegetic stride.

What People Are Saying

Walter Isaacson
enthralling, poignant, and at times painful...most fascinating character...is Denby...who records with brutal honesty the...turmoil encountered.
—author of Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

Product Details

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Table of Contents

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American Sucker

Little, Brown

Chapter One

Quarterly Report, January 1, 2000 Cumulative Net Gain/Loss 0

SOMETIME in early January 2000, I became aware that I was jabbering.

I was on the phone, in my little study at home on West End Avenue, in Manhattan,
and speaking as breathlessly as a cattle auctioneer in full cry. Jumping over
verbal fences, mashing participials, dropping qualifiers ... I was talking to an
old friend about movies, and I said something like this: Movie people think
platforming works only with quality-word-of-mouth and slow-building
three-four-million-a-week pictures in which buzz rolls into multiple viewings
like The English Patient or Shakespeare in Love ... I had trouble saying one thing
at a time. I had to say two things, or three, tucking statistics into my words
as I talked, and I seemed to be grouping ideas or pieces of information
rhythmically, by association, rather than by cause and effect. As I hung up, I
wondered, Who is this nut, gathering and expelling information in charged little
clumps, like a Web site spilling bytes?

Babbling-brook behavior is common among journalists, and also, perhaps, among
ambitious New Yorkers, who like to imagine that they are moving on a fasttrack
leading somewhere - to the best table in heaven, perhaps. In part, the habit may
be regional and occupational. Certainly the tempo of Al Gore's discourse, a
procession of potted palms thudding across a wide desert, drove me crazy in that
election year. But, then, it seemed to drive everyone crazy, even people from
the South and the West, so region may have very little to do with it after all.
And journalists, now that I think about it, talk at all speeds. At my magazine,
The New Yorker, no one wastes words, but no one assails his listener like a
jackhammer, either. It isn't dignified. Soon after the phone conversation with
my friend, I thought back over the previous few months. I remembered ranting on
and on at a party. No one interrupted, but no one commented, either. They were
waiting for the storm to pass. Cowed, they sighed and rolled their eyes as if I
were trying to impress them, when from my point of view, I was just trying to
get it all in. What was causing the rush?

By the beginning of 2000, my life had changed in a number of extraordinarily
important ways, but most of it was still in place.

As I saw it, my job, as always, was to build a family, build a career, observe,
observe, learn a few things, write them down, and get them into good enough
shape to publish in a magazine or a book. I was a married, middle-class
professional, a critic and journalist-an Upper West Sider, and therefore one of
God's sober creatures, a householder and provider living among Manhattan's brown
and gray buildings. The Upper West Side was the land of responsibility, a family
neighborhood, hardworking, increasingly prosperous-and pleasureless, some would
say. There were parks, there were dogs, there were many places to buy broccoli
and diapers, to get suits pressed and prescriptions filled.

But there were few elegant people (even the wealthy dressed like assistant
professors), few art galleries or clubs, no wicked entertainments to speak of.
You could walk for blocks without finding so much as a neighborhood bar.

My wife and I had added two boys to the swarm of children laughing and shoving
on Broadway and shooting basketballs at the netless rims in Riverside Park. They
were skinny boys, both of them. We fed them virtuously with fresh vegetables and
fruit purchased at the long produce counters of the great Fairway Market, at
Broadway and 74th. At breakfast, I plowed through the New York Times and the
Wall Street Journal, and at night I watched the news (the stentorian Tom Brokaw,
holding aloft the national virtue) and political chat shows (Chris Matthews
interrupting God as He explained His policies on the third day of creation). I
made my living writing for The New Yorker (and earlier for New York magazine). I
went to Woody Allen movies and sometimes (as a type) appeared in them. I had
been reviewing movies in one place or another since 1969. At the beginning of
the nineties, when it became obvious to anyone with eyes to see that American
movies, under conglomerate control, were not going anyplace wonderful, I wrote
Great Books, in which a middle-aged man-me-slapped himself out of unhappiness by
returning to his undergraduate college (Columbia) and rereading some of the
Western literary and political-theory classics. Defending the books against the
ideological manhandling they were being subjected to from left and right, I had
made a few enemies to be proud of with that book, and a few friends, too, also
to be proud of.

Thus the armature of routine, the thick-barked trunk of family love and work for
a man of fifty-six. But in the months before I heard myself chattering, my daily
habits had changed: I had become obsessed with piling up money, obsessed with
the stock market, and I spent hours most weekdays watching CNBC. The men and
women of financial reporting, my new friends, went on the air every trading day
at five in the morning.

They remained on the air all day, mopping up after the market closed at 4:00
P.M. with various recaps, surveys, predictions, and so on, continuing until
eight, at which point the hard-blowing Matthews and the somber Brian Williams
took over with the less important criminal, political, and constitutional
entertainments of the day. Like several hundred thousand other Americans, I had
become addicted to the reporters on CNBC, our joshing chroniclers of the
national hopes. They were with us.

On New Year's Day of 2000, the market was closed, and I relinquished CNBC and
went to a party. A terrific group had gathered together, teachers, lawyers,
journalists, editors, novelists, smart people, and nice, too -good people -and I
ate smoked salmon and drank mimosas and spoke too rapidly to a great many of
them. I wanted to talk about the market, and they wanted to talk about politics,
journalism, and children, and after a while, I thought, Pleasure! What a waste
of time! Every other weekday morning, I would take my post in the kitchen,
looking at the little TV perched on the granite counter. A half hour, I told
myself. Forty-five minutes, that's all! The kitchen was not a comfortable place
to watch TV. But then, ignoring the cat, Daphne, who rubbed against my shins and
nipped at my ankles, I would sit there for two or three hours, fascinated by the
stock tickers running at the bottom of the image, by the declining thirty-year- bond
yield and the shocking new Producers Price Index Number. Everything that
happens in the market is related to every other thing; it is a gigantic puzzle
whose parts move as unceasingly as the tentacles of an underwater creature. It
was all new to me-the Consumer Confidence Index! Wow!-and I was amazed. Even
though I knew that some of what they said was hooey, I sat patiently through
interviews with strategists from the big brokerage houses, with CEOs and money
managers, with gurus and savants of various sorts who spread their blankets and
displayed their urns and gourds and gave their opinions of shifting currents in
the bazaar. It was a rattle of semi-worthless but spellbinding words. I loved
it.

Speaking over the din of a brokerage trading floor, many of the CNBC reporters
and their guests raced like corsairs. They had very little airtime in which to
say complicated things. But more than that, they were driven by the tempo of the
market itself, the pulsing, darting flow of money around the globe, all of it
intensified, as the CNBC anchors broke for commercials, by that rhythmic
clickety-clack of electronic noise needled by a snare drum ...
dig-a-dig-a-dig-a-dig-a-DIG-a-dig-a ... Were all the beats the same? Or were
there, as I imagined, little emphases which turned the pulse into the music of
money? Speed was inside my head, and I couldn't get it out.

At that moment, in early 2000, you were sure that if you could just grab hold of
the flying coattails of the New Economy investments, you could get rich very
quickly. The newspapers and CNBC were filled with stories of
twenty-four-year-old millionaires, start-up companies going through the roof,
initial public offerings outlandishly doubling and tripling their price on their
first day of trading. And the market! In the previous year, 1999, the Nasdaq
composite index went up 85.6 percent; it went up by more than 39 percent the
year before. And, as the market soared, you could feel it. You would have to be
insensible not to feel it. All around, in the suddenly resplendent corporate
pomp of once-dreary San Jose in Silicon Valley; in the crisp linen and sparkle
of a downtown Manhattan restaurant at lunchtime; in the fatted pages of new and
brazenly successful Internet magazines like the Industry Standard-in all these
places and many more, you could sense the thrilling, oxygen-rich happiness of
wealth being created overnight.

My urgency was driven by hunger. Making money seemed a function of quickness,
and in the market, more than anywhere else, you experienced time as the instant
dead past. The market underlines the mystery and terror of time: It never stops.
As I sat there in the kitchen watching CNBC, there was only the next instant,
and the next, rushing toward you, and I kept trying to catch up. In Times
Square, across the street from The New Yorker's office, the news headlines and
stock results from Dow Jones -"the zipper"-flashed around the corners of the
old Times tower. My eyes would travel with a group of words until they hit the
corner and disappeared. That was time, always moving on:

No one could pull the words back. Either read them or lose the information
forever. The zipper made me slightly ill, and there were much more powerful
zippers around. Using the Internet as a speed lane, an ideally informed person
would never sleep at all but would trade the markets and chase news and rumors
through the links twenty-four hours a day. What bliss! What a nightmare! The
market, it turns out, is the quintessence of instability in the Information Age,
the perfect paradigm of life as ceaseless change. That is why it is so
mesmerizing, so defeating, and, again, so mesmerizing.

I needed to make money, serious money, that year. Not for the usual reasons that
prosperous people want to have more cash. I did not want to buy a villa in
Tuscany or a BMW 540i or the Lynx $7,692 gas grill with dual smoker drawers.
What in the world could you do with such a resplendent cooking apparatus?
Barbecue gold-leafed weenies on it? In all, I was quite sure that I was not the
patsy-victim of the standard smug liberal critique -the American who does not
know that money can't buy happiness.

No, I didn't want to buy anything in particular. I wanted the money so I could
hold on to something very important to me. For I had already lost something of
incomparable value - not a possession, but the center of my life-and I was in
danger of losing a great deal else.

At the beginning of 1999, a year earlier, my wife, Cathleen Schine, announced
that she no longer wanted to be married to me. She had to leave, she had to get
away for a new life, for she had mysteriously changed in her affections. Not
just in her affections.

She had changed in her being, and she was no longer whole, she was broken, and I
was not the one to fix what was wrong.

The announcement was not altogether a surprise. She had been slipping away for a
few years, withdrawing into quiet or studied indifference. I couldn't get her to
talk about it, she was holding it inside. She didn't mean to hurt me, I now
think, but sitting in bed at night reading or speaking on the phone, she was
unreachable -and then sleepy and irritable. I stood there like a rejected
petitioner, chewing on my innards but unwilling to fight.

"I have to go to sleep now." "But I want to talk."

Talk was the center; we used to talk over everything, endlessly. But in those
bad years a polite silence had descended on the marriage, darkened on my side
with foreboding and on hers with unhappiness. She was increasingly depressed.
Dark circles appeared under her eyes, she became immobile-the bed was her home,
her fortress. And then she wanted to get away. "If you really loved me, you
would want me to be happy," she said on the day in 1999 when she first said she
wanted to leave, a sentence that no lover ever wants to hear. She was sitting in
bed, miserable. I was pacing around the bedroom, in a sweat.

"I love you," she said. "But I can't live with you anymore." For a full year
after her announcement, I tried to keep the marriage together. We continued to
live in the same apartment with the two boys, Max, who turned sixteen in June of
1999, and Thomas, who turned twelve the same month. But she was elsewhere, as
remote as a beauty queen on a float drifting down the street to the cheers of
other crowds farther and farther away.

I didn't break down, or stop working. A shipshape magazine like The New Yorker
doesn't let its writers fall into the sea. Good words must be written, and I
wrote some of them. But there was a gathering heaviness in my chest and a
feeling of forlornness, as if the roof had come flying off my head. Over that
year of 1999, it came off piece by piece, as in a slow-motion movie of a storm,
first the corners flapping and rising, and then the shingles lifting, a few at a
time, then a few more, and then the whole thing violently tearing away in a
gale. I was in love with my wife, novelist Cathleen Schine, and proud of the
marriage, too, which seemed to me an astounding yet permanent fact in the world,
like some comet that kept flying forever. It had lasted for eighteen years, and
I couldn't believe it was over. I couldn't take it in; I was sure there had to
be some mistake, some error, something we had forgotten, some place in the past
we could go back to-a niche, a landing where we could reassemble and start
again.

At night, I paced around the room while she sat sorrowfully in bed. Some
pleasure that we still shared, some experience! A moment in the country, a piece
of music, an adventure with the kids. We could repeat that moment, rediscover
that quality, and remember what we had lost. But she could no longer join me
there.

For almost two decades, I had felt that no thought of mine was complete until I
had conveyed it to her. A new movie-I was full of news about movies, since I
reviewed them for a living. The cost of fish at Citarella, another of the local
markets on Broadway. Darwin sitting on the giant tortoise's back in the
Galapagos Islands, rapping his stick on the shell to get the beast to move-we
had loved that image and had gone to the Gala together.

Continues...

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Excerpted from American Sucker
by David Denby
Copyright © 2004 by David Denby.
Excerpted by permission.
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