You Hated Loving It

Dana Vachon’s “Mergers & Acquisitions” (Riverhead, 304 pages, $23.95) is a heartwarming Horatio Alger story for our times: riches to even more riches. Mr. Vachon’s bio notes that he was “born in Greenwich, Connecticut. … He attended Duke University, and graduated, as he claims, ‘cum nihilo’ in 2002.”“Cum nihilo” is Latin for “landed a job as an analyst at JPMorgan and began work on this novel,” a book for which he is reported to have received an advance of nearly three-quarters of a million dollars. The advance includes a second novel, as is customary these days. It will be amusing to see what Mr. Vachon comes up with, having already used up his autobiography.To dwell on this backstory would be sour grapes if “Mergers & Acquisitions” wasn’t preoccupied with the discomfiture and guilt of ill-gotten spoils. The book opens at a swank engagement party, of which the narrator, first-year banker Tommy Quinn, remarks, “You hated loving being there.”That pious nugget comes close to exhausting Mr. Vachon’s mines of Solomonic wisdom. Later there follows the revelation that many banking jobs are awarded “through back channels,” a form of “affirmative action for the already affirmed.” While you’re gasping at that, here’s another shocker: The publishing industry works the same way. How else could this sitcom teleplay be shoehorned between two covers and stamped “A Novel”?A Wall Street “immorality tale,” as Jay McInerney’s blurb so cutely puts it, can move units, and Mr. Vachon is that rare I-banker who can put together a competent book. The moral is easy to swallow — so easy, in fact, that it had been addressed to our satisfaction by about 20 pages of “American Psycho.”All the same, there are fewer than a dozen sentences in the entire book that don’t fall flat. “We expect too much of God and too little of ourselves,” Tommy says. “Our lies can become more precious than our truths.” Who are you trying to kid?Part of the problem is that Mr. Vachon doesn’t know what he wants his book to be. Is he aiming for the Wavian sneer of “Vile Bodies”? Or is he trying for chick-lit? I have to wonder whether “Mergers & Acquisitions” is meant for the girlfriends of high-powered I-bankers, hot on the fantasy that these men have rich, romantic inner lives despite all the evidence to the contrary:The old Parisian woman smiled broadly and adjusted her vermilion bouffant and did not watch or bark as we went into the sunflowers. Looking back, it was beautiful, but I was at that point beginning to grow used to beauty, which was suddenly everywhere. … I felt Frances’s arms around my waist, and her lips on my ear, and her voice within it, speaking in French at first, Je t’aime, and then providing translation.A romance between French peasants playing itself out this way would be bad enough. A romance between a young I-banker and a rich art-history bore who’s also a self-mutilator … well, that doesn’t even look good on paper, does it?But the “satire” is what deep-sixes “Mergers & Acquisitions.” The book shows how fully humor has been degraded and homogenized by television. Roger Thorne, Tommy Quinn’s sleazy mentor, never gets much sleazier than referring to women as “babes,” and makes the duo from “Wedding Crashers” seem as three-dimensional and engaging as the Earl of Rochester.What else? Let’s see: monkeys, pirates, an Indian guy who speaks in dialogue virtually cribbed from “The Simpsons” (“What in Shiva’s name are you doing here?”), a Hindu priest who eats White Castle burgers, a Red Bull-related heart attack, Eastern European beauties named Vanita and Dementieva, a Brit called Lord Peregrine whose female quarry parries his comeons with “Good lord, Lord!” This is not comedy, this is Jimmy Kimmel’s “Man Show” leftovers.My favorite is when Roger lets himself be taped having sex with an avant-garde video artist’s sexy personal assistant, and then says, in a different context, “There will be enough of Roger Thorne for everyone!” Our narrator adds: “He was to be proven more correct than anyone could have imagined.”Except you, gentle reader. You can guess exactly where it’s headed — as with most of this book’s cheap gags — unless you’ve been hit in the head with a croquet mallet. You won’t laugh when it gets there: Literature doesn’t get much lazier than this. “In the space of a final epiphany, I understood it all,” concludes Tommy Quinn. He doesn’t tell you what — it just sounds good. He expects you to buy it. After all, “people buy crap all the time … that’s how wealth is built.” You should feel honored to be in on the joke.Mr. Beck last wrote for these pages on Joshua Ferris.

You Hated Loving It

You Hated Loving It

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