Jacob Cohen, the yellow-cab executive at the heart of my debut novel, Atta Boy, is the quintessential Trump-era blusterer, his fortune built on a shadowy empire of dubious side-hustles and Matryoshka-doll-like shell companies. He’s powerfully convinced, and convincing, I think, of a vision of himself as a noble striver, a proverbial little guy living by his wits, a husband, father, and friend who would have us hate the game, and love the player. Our regard for fraudsters isn’t strictly disapproving, after all, but analogous, in some ways, to what we feel for, say, mafiosos, who in their charisma and realpolitik appear to us as symptoms, rather than causes, of the toxic materialism and corruptibility of their society and age.
That so many stories of grifters and white-collar criminals are New York stories, too, will strike no one as a coincidence: wherever staggering wealth and miserable privation coexist so closely is a natural playground for the shyster. As Mark Helprin wrote of one of his characters in a very different, very lovable New York novel, Winter’s Tale: “It was necessary for him to be in Manhattan because he was a burglar, and for a burglar to work anyplace else was a shattering admission of mediocrity.”
Here are some great books, including one play, that cut to the complicated heart of fraud and white-collar criminality, unflinching in how they examine human greed while evading facile definitions of good and evil, and keenly attuned to how razor-thin the defining line can be—between spin and lies, between corner-cutting and malfeasance, between good old-fashioned entrepreneurship and dangerous hucksterism.
A Disposition to Be Rich: Ferdinand Ward, the Greatest Swindler of the Gilded Age by Geoffrey C. Ward
This is a vivid, elegant conjuring of the life of Gilded Age New York’s most notorious fraudster, whose Wall Street brokerage firm bilked none other than President Ulysses S. Grant out of his nest egg. That the author is said swindler’s great-grandson only adds to the book’s historical rigor—and emotional power.
The Darlings by Christina Alger
This tightly plotted debut follows the spectacular fall of the family-owned Delphic financial firm over Thanksgiving weekend, 2008, after one of its principal partners commits suicide. The event has grave implications for the Darling family, patriarch Carter, daughter Merrill, and Merrill’s husband, Paul Ross, a lawyer who’s increasingly concerned the family wealth he’s married into is founded on a smoke-and-mirrors Ponzi scheme. Upon its release, in 2011, The Darlings was one of the first novels to address the financial crisis head-on. A page-turner, for sure, but there’s a nicely metafictional element to the proceedings, too; Alger seems particularly sensitive to how high finance, like literature, is essentially a form of fantasy, an imaginative world beyond the nuts and bolts of the economy, where financiers and lawyers can bend reality itself to their rhetorical whims.
A Replacement Life by Boris Fishman
Slava Gelman might be the least guileful, most lovable protagonist on this list, a 25-year-old Brooklyn man who gets caught up in a scheme to defraud the German government by fabricating Holocaust survival stories among his community’s elders, Jewish Soviet émigrés who may not have technically survived the Holocaust, put feel damned entitled to some restitutions for it (and who is Slava to say they’re not?). In fleet-footed style, this 2006-set story examines questions of truth, justice, and trauma, and just who gets to arbitrate on them. What’s more, it beautifully evokes the Soviet diaspora in South Brooklyn.
Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keeffe
I couldn’t have avoided shouting out the Sackler family in Atta Boy, those stately, mysterious benefactors whose names emblazoned a dizzying number of museum and library wings throughout my childhood in the city. This book, an equally engrossing follow-up to Keeffe’s Say Nothing, about the troubles in Ireland, tells the story of the family who almost single-handedly created the opioid crisis, bringing to life a Succession-like world of staggering wealth and willful deflection.
Social Creature by Tara Isabella Burton
This one’s more on the “delightfully bizarre beach-read” end of the spectrum. Louise is a barista and would-be writer who is swept up into the fabulous world of Lavinia, a socialite; this tells the story of their toxic friendship, and the former’s increasingly desperate effort to keep up appearances. A class and power imbalance in friendship is nothing new, nor is the Machiavellian protagonist here—something like Cinderella by way of Tom Ripley. But the author gives it all a fresh, late-millennial spin, with a keen eye for how the social-media hall of mirrors aids in the construction of false identities.
Lake Success by Gary Shteyngart
This was Shteyngart’s Trump novel, written in a fever dream in the summer of 2016, a way of preemptively reconciling himself with the behemoth on the horizon. Barry Cohen, a hedge-funder in crisis, is a curious and compelling inversion the Gordon Gekko-Patrick Bateman-Sherman McCoy rich-dude prototype, not a suave, confident master of the universe but an insecure, neurotic frump, haunted by visions of a purer, more fulfilling life, rich but not that rich (Shteyngart is hilariously attuned to the absurdity of wealth in contemporary New York, a misery-breeding status quo of constantly counting one’s neighbor’s money, in his hands, we’re improbably sympathetic to what furious upkeep it all requires). While the SEC puts the screws on his hedge fund after a bad investment with a Martin Shkreli-like fraudster, and his estranged wife grapples with their son’s autism diagnosis, he takes off across the country in search of absolution, and himself. Tender, melancholy, and amazingly well-observed, this was definitely a touchstone for me in conjuring the world and tone of Atta Boy.
Can You Ever Forgive Me?: Memoirs of a Literary Forger by Lee Israel
The premise of this slim true-crime confessional feels like a screwball Great Depression comedy, down-on-her-luck biographer and a bona fide NYC cat lady, out of favor with the publishing elite, finds her fortunes finally turning when she starts impersonating famous literary figures and selling their letters to memorabilia dealers. . . . It’s fascinating to see the sense in which Lee’s outright imitation of her subjects was, in a way, only the logical extension of the biographical writing on which she’d first cut her teeth. Short, sweet, and biting, and just as good as the movie.
Six Degrees of Separation by John Guare
I read this 1990 Pulitzer-nominated play in high school, and was recently surprised to find how well it holds up in the post-2020 era. In it, a young black man named Paul shows up at the Upper West Side apartment of the Kittredges, suffering from a stab wound. He’s just been mugged, and what’s more, he knows them—he’s a friend of their son at Harvard’s, and Sidney Poitier’s son, no less. If his story strains credulity, these well-meaning liberals eat it up. In the 1993 film adaptation, Stockard Channing and Donald Sutherland are a great couple of dithering art dealers to Will Smith’s moving, unforgettable huckster, a heartbreaking street hustler bound implicitly for a tragic end . . . This examination of white guilt and complicity turns the territory of the “issues” drama into a broader, more existential musing on what connects, and separates, us all.
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