Most Helpful Customer Reviews
|
|
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A DAZZLER OF A DEBUT, 8 Jul 2007
If you enjoyed Brights Lights, Big City and The Devil Wears Prada, run do not walk to get a copy of Mergers & Acquisitions. It's a satirical take on life among the rich and powerful in New York City as seen through the eyes of Tommy Quinn, a young graduate of Georgetown who has just landed what he believes to be the plummiest job of all - investment banker at J. S. Spenser. As if that didn't make life sweet enough he's also met the most terrific gal he's ever laid eyes on - Frances Sloan, daughter of much old money.
Author Vachon has stated that all the characters in his book are based on people he knows or knew save for Frances. If that's the case, do all you can to avoid whoever was the model for Roger Thorne, a graduate of Princeton. This guy is without scruples, sex crazy, and out for all he can get. Roger is Tommy's buddy in the story, which doesn't say a great deal for Tommy's early taste in friends.
Our narrative opens with a fabulous engagement party at the New York Racquet and Tennis Club. The event is described as being the kind of soiree that you hated loving being there. Only one of a myriad of scenes painted with fine brush strokes, the gathering represents Vachon's territory when putting in his time at J. P. Morgan. He mines past experiences with gusto, sparking them with whiplash asides.
Vachon is quoted as saying that the culture of Wall Street has always fascinated him and "The scale of this latest boom - in hedge funds, M&A and private equity - dwarfs anything produced by a prior prosperity. Young people are making fortunes like never before, and cultural eddies have developed with the hilarity and irony and beauty and brutality that accompany all situations of social extremis."
Thus, Mergers & Acquisitions is a tale of excess - excess everything and it's related with perception, candor, humor. Vachon received a $650,000 advance for this, his first novel, so he's obviously thought of as the new NY lit hit. I have a tendency to agree. This is a dazzler of a debut.
Enjoy!
- Gail Cooke
|
|
|
1.0 out of 5 stars
Worse than bad; boring, 8 May 2008
There are good books, and there are bad books, and then there are the worst kind; the boring books. This fell into the third category.
You meet the lead character as he embarks upon a career in the mergers and acquisitions department of a successful Manhattan bank. This is pretty much the last you hear of banking as the rest of the novel devolves into a farce of farting and weak jokes about monogramming.
Even this complete lack of a coherent plot wouldn't be so bad but for the fact that you just don't care about the protagonist, and you care even less about the others that populate his world as they drift from event to event without ever managing to reach conclusion or consequence, and the beginnings of some good ideas about the nature of love, the possibility of escape and death and rebirth were, unfortunately, lost in a melange of tales of watches, preposterous sex and imbecilic women.
Unfortunately I must say that the only thing that kept me going through this book was a bloody-minded desire to get it over and done with.
|
|
|
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Mergers and Acquisitions??.. - Where??, 27 Oct 2007
First the book's title is a misnomen, it is a personal story of a J.P.Morgan's trainee with little on M&A. I am on page 65 right now and there were 5 paragraphs so far about finance. The character is neither here nor there, neither rags to riches story, nor a real intellectual-thinker with world-class brains, nor blue blood aristocracy, nor even self-made or an Ivy League grad, - rather an entirely non-descript and frankly boring. He is dragging on and on and on about his equally boring family and thier berivement that happened 15 (?) years ago. May be it will get better, but my interest is now gone - I gave it a good chance.
No true spirit, this book is a weak imitation of Liar's Poker - the original gem! Harsh as I am here, it might be promising for some persistant student trying to get a feel for a graduate training, - then there is a good chance they might be happy, thrilled and satisfied, but there is an equal chance they might be thouroughly disappointed. Certainly in New York the society and its influence is noticeable, but there are ways and there are ways to go about it... For most others, particularly with experience the book is a waste in my humble view.
|
|
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews
|