Vachon’s novel is an absurdist roman a clef about an incompetent junior analyst at a stand-in for JPMorgan’s M&A group. Though there’s a bit too much anomie, and you can skip the parts having to do with anything other than investment banking, Vachon is great with over-the-top characters, including Makkesh Makker, the kindly, overworked banker who has to supervise the protagonist's early work in energy (“These oil fields have no oil! They are not oil fields! Just fields! … And everything you do is wrong, anyway! So for now, we have no more work to do!”), and Roger Thorne, the incompetent WASP who succeeds at everything he does (“Thorne’s hobbies, I soon learned, including sunbathing, squash, and the acquisition of luxury goods”). I liked the book, especially the part where our hero realized he undervalued a deal by $600 million dollars by converting Canadian dollars into American dollars twice, breaking "new ground as a financial pioneer, the first and only man to ever successfully convert the U.S. dollar into itself. This I did at the rate of 1.58 U.S. dollars to the U.S. dollar.”

I'll read Vachon's next book.

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