• Reviewing Peter Mountford’s excellent first novel for NPR
• Reading David Sirota’s latest for the Columbia Journalism Review
• On Doug Saunders’ highly recommended Arrival City for NPR
• On Aminatta Forna for the San Francisco Chronicle
• Another short love letter to Geoff Dyer in the Washington City Paper

More soon!

Apologies again for being negligent about updating this blog (that’ll improve in the near future, promise), but on a more exciting note, I just started editing Idiom’s new books site! I/we will be publishing 3-4 long reviews a month, and there’s already exciting stuff ready to read on the site, which you’re encouraged to visit.

I have an essay up on Boris Groys and self-design up here; an older piece I forgot to link to on Jessica Mitford for the Daily Beast (now the NewsBeast, I suppose?); a grinch-y Christmas-pegged piece for the San Francisco Chronicle, a review of the excellent Sandor Marai for NPR; and lots of things en route to publication, which will be linked to in due course.

Also: I reviewed Steve Martin and Jonathan Dee’s novels for the Times Literary Supplement, but unfortunately, they’re not online, so email me if the suspense is killing you.

Til soon.

UPON ITS publication in 1925, “On Elegance While Sleeping” launched Lascano Tegui, a self- appointed “viscount,” to the heights of literary fame, both in Argentina, where he was born, and in Paris, where he lived and worked as a diplomat, journalist and (yes) dental mechanic. Although Tegui published several autobiographical novels after “Elegance”—and was once heralded as among Argentina’s most talented modernists—most of his work has spent decades out of print, even in his native country. Tegui’s reputation is only now being excavated in Argentina, and Idra Novey’s lively translation of “On Elegance While Sleeping” marks his first, and long overdue, appearance in English.

Set in a provincial French village at some point in the 19th century, Tegui’s bizarre novella is styled as a journal and reminiscent of a fever dream. We read a series of dispatches from the fragile mind of Meursault, a young French Raskolnikov caught between the desire to write a book and the desire to commit a murder. Eventually, through a tangled and increasingly disturbed logic, he concludes that it makes no difference which he does. “At the Moulin Rouge that night,” the novel begins, “I heard a woman standing nearby say in Spanish: ‘That man’s taken such good care of his hands, the only thing left is to murder someone with them.’ “

Tegui once remarked that he wrote “out of pure voluptuousness,” and “Elegance” reflects this impulse. When Meursault is not plotting to kill, he is trying on corsets, fantasizing about goats, and writing journal entries that oscillate between lyrical reflection and icy calculation. As the novel flows toward its inevitable crime, the entries take on a frenetic tone. Gradually the narrator’s reliability is undermined so thoroughly that it is impossible to know whether what one is reading is meant to be real or an elaborate fantasy.

A clue to the narrative schizophrenia of “Elegance”—and its narrator’s own sexualized anxiety—is eventually revealed in Meursault’s proposed subject for another book: an account of his decline into syphilis.

—Jessica Loudis

In 1962, at age 11, Carlos Eire was rescued from what he calls the “totalitarian nightmare” of revolutionary Cuba by Operation Pedro Pan, a U.S.-sponsored airlift that whisked 14,000 children to Miami before Castro sealed his kingdom. This follow-up to Mr. Eire’s National Book Award-winning 2003 memoir, “Waiting for Snow in Havana,”begins with his arrival, parentless and barely conversant in English, in the U.S. Over the next three years, while he waited for his mother to join him, the boy formerly known as Carlos would become Charles, Charlie and Chuck Neat-o as he drifted among foster homes.

Mr. Eire can be unsparing about the difficulties of émigré life in the U.S. He and his brother were foisted onto abusive foster parents—referred to only as “Lucy and Ricky Ricardo”—before being summoned to live with relatives in Bloomington, Ill. But while his sibling retreated into émigré culture, Mr. Eire became a fan of football, mimicked the speech of Andy Griffith and spent afternoons at the library developing habits that would one day earn him a professorship at Yale.

The author writes with both levity and wisdom about the tension between Carlos the Cuban and Charles the American, describing his process of maturing as “learning to die”—or, more prosaically, to let go of worldly attachments such as his childhood memories of life in Cuba. With each move, unrequited schoolyard crush or achievement in his adopted language, he sheds a former self. Eventually he embraces this continual reinvention as itself something distinctly American.

Lawrence Weiner, Time/Bank Currency, 2010. Photo: Julieta Aranda. Via Austin Thomas.

A universal search of e-flux’s Time/Bank project at 3:56 p.m. on Friday, November 12, turns up the following results, listed in descending chronological order:

For one hour of time, robgreene in Los Angeles “will provide 1 hour of DJing with either vinyl records, CDs, or both of all your favorite soulful, nostalgic jams!”

For 24 hours of time, Claudia in Germany asks readers to “send me your artwork, whether finished or in progress, and I will ask random passers-by and/or my grandma how they think you should proceed.”

And for two hours of time, mjg in New York offers to “draw you a picture and mail it to you (or exchange in person if you live in NYC). All I ask in turn is that you get a frame for it and hang it proudly on your wall.”

The currency is time, and the product is cultural work, or auxiliary services surrounding it. In exchange for translating a press release, babysitting a four-year-old or letting somebody crash on their couch—the definition of ‘work’ is subject to interpretation—participants in e-flux’s Time/Bank are awarded “Hour Notes” redeemable for goods on sale at the organization’s Essex Street storefront. (And not just there: a satellite location recently opened in Liverpool, and plans are afoot to launch more). To get involved, time bankers post ads detailing their skills or requesting somebody else’s, positioning themselves in a barter economy that’s occupationally delimited but functionally global.

e-flux dates the origins of time-banking back to British social reformer Robert Owen and American Josiah Warren, an anarchist who brought the system stateside in 1827 with the Cincinnati Time Store. Since then, time-banks have materialized in college towns and economically depressed communities across the country, realigning the relationship between functional value and work in an era of neoliberalism and abstract capital. The most high-profile American system currently operating is the Ithaca Hours, which Paul Glover established in 1991 and christened after its post-industrial hometown. London and Glasgow are also home to notable inner-city time banks, as is the student haven of Madison, Wisconsin, whose branch has over a thousand members. With its 21st century spin on utopian socialism and reliance on grassroots organization, it was only a matter of time before the system was adopted by artists.

Throwback, via Josiah Warren Project

While time banking itself falls within an older mold, e-flux’s iteration has a slightly different audience. By focusing exclusively on culture workers, Time/Bank highlights the precarity that unites the creative class with low-wage laborers in the brave new globalized economy. As Andrew Ross observes in Nice Work if You Can Get It, “flexploitataion” and the decline of Fordism have rendered white-collar workers structurally vulnerable, a position that’s mirrored in the migrant workforce. “Once they are in the game,” Ross writes of creative workers, “some of the players thrive, but most subsist, neither as employers nor traditional employees, in a limbo of uncertainty, juggling their options, massaging their contracts, managing their overcommitted time, and developing coping strategies for handling the uncertainty of never knowing where their next project, or source of income, is coming from.” Broke culture workers, in short, are the ideal participants in an economic system that feeds on precarity. Not a new conceit, but one that feels especially significant when surveying the cradle-to-art school wares at the Essex Street store. Time/Bank may enable creative workers to live comfortably as leftists, but it also implies that this is perhaps a less voluntary association than in the past.

A quick scan of the shelves offers dissertations’ worth of material for future cultural anthropologists. In addition to toothbrushes and a variety of dried foods, necessary goods include the following: texts on Hegel and anarcho-syndicalism (30 minutes); condoms (20 minutes); paintbrushes (15 minutes); yoga mat (one hour); guitar (14 hours); Casio watches (2 hours); hemp soap (one hour); Chia Lincoln (one hour); stovetop coffee maker (2 hours); and a blue Peugeot bike—originally fifteen hours, reduced to ten due to necessary repair work. These are the must-haves of a certain subset of the cultural stratosphere, revealing that the project’s real divide is social, not economic.

With this in mind, a prescient question that Time/Bank raises is what counts as work in the creative economy, and subsequently, what qualifies as luxury. An easy way of approaching this is through the division between material and immaterial labor: construction or dog walking read easily as physical work, but what about conceptualizing web projects or curating art shows? In the context of the project, it’s all the same, with quality and value determined by users and unmoored from physical output. Assuming the time costs are the same, fixing a guitar or building a shelf is worth exactly as much as German-English translation or theorizing about art. Ultimately, the question isn’t one of labor, but of value.

e-flux, PAWNSHOP, 2007. Via e-flux

In 2007, e-flux planted the seeds for Time/Bank with PAWNSHOP, a project that explored the “poetics of circulation and distribution” by inviting 60 artists to contribute works that would be reclaimed or eventually pawned to the public. “A pawnshop,” the press release explains, “is a stage where merchandise and money dance in a choreography that could have them circle back and cancel each other out, but in fact rarely does.” Rather than floating back and forth over the hazy border between exchange value and use value, items at pawn shops typically sit unused on shelves, slowly going to rot while their monetary avatars are off having a good time. By sticking 60 indisputably valuable artworks in a pawnshop, e-flux forced a clash between contradictory models of value, momentarily transforming a holding cell for unwanted or useless but valuable goods into a kind of gallery space. With the distance between goods and capital ever increasing—or at least, goods and our ability to value them—Time/Bank picks up where Pawnshop leaves off, creating a nearly closed system that’s pegged entirely to use value.

As anthropologist David Graeber points out in his incisive article about art and immaterial labor—a concept he thrashes before leaving for dead—the value of art comes from its recognition by moneyed tastemakers. Artists produce things, Graeber writes, physical items that “financiers can baptize, consecrate, through money and thus turn into art.” Bankers don’t produce tangible items, but it’s their verdict that determines whether an artist shopping in the Time/Bank store is doing so out of luxury or necessity. But Graeber insists that this isn’t cause for anti-capitalist despair: money migrating from bankers to artists enters alternative spaces much the way that government welfare checks do. “It is never clear,” he writes of art sales, “who exactly is scamming whom.” This opaque system of valuation is the referent in Time/Bank, and it’s one that e-flux cleverly undermines by positing a workable alternative. Without necessarily suggesting a fundamental realignment, the project’s central insight is that people will work for what they care about, so long as they’re allowed to determine what matters to them.

“He has just finished a very short book; nevertheless, it took several years to write. At first he gathered materials: he accumulated almost three hundred pages; but he gradually reversed course, throwing more and more away, as if instead of adding stories he wanted to subtract or erase them. The result was paltry:  an emaciated sheaf of forty-seven pages that he insists on calling a novel.”

—The Private Lives of Trees

In his first work of fiction, Alejandro Zambra introduced himself to readers with a slim novella that wears its architecture on its surface, a love story that begins by announcing its ending, and ends right back at the beginning. Bonsai opens on Emilia and Julio, a pair of college students who meet, read Proust and follar, until on page 35, their stories diverge. Per the first paragraph, Emilia dies and Julio does not, spending his days transcribing a failed novel called “Bonsai.” At 83 pages with ample margins, Bonsai is more of a prose poem than a novella, and were it not for Zambra’s habit of revealing his literary designs, it might be mistaken for one, too.

“A bonsai is an artistic replica of a tree, in miniature,” Julio learns in a manual on plant care. “It consists of two elements: the living tree and the container.” The bonsai makes its first appearance as a metaphor for love, but fittingly, it grows beyond its confines. Appearing in both of his novels, the bonsai mimics the duality of Zambra’s literary approach. It connotes love and the fictions that maintain it, the novel itself, and the act of writing. Both efforts are bound by a leap of faith, and the bonsai—in all its forms—marks this motion. “Once outside its flowerpot, a tree ceases to be a bonsai,” Julio’s manual says, and the novel’s self-consciousness sustains this balance. By calling attention to fiction—and reminding readers that his characters are just that—Zambra powerfully evokes the tension between reality and literature.

As a poet, critic, and novelist, Zambra is a young and rising star in his native Chile. Prior to Bonsai, he published two books of poetry, taught literature at a private Santiago university, and worked as a critic at a handful of newspapers. Following the novella’s 2006 release, his reputation surpassed Chile’s borders. Zambra was awarded a national Critics’ Prize for Bonsai, and ranked among the “Bogota 39”—one of the top 39 Latin American authors under that age.

In 2007’s The Private Lives of Trees, Zambra returns to the intersection of art, life and the botanical with the story of Julián, a literature professor who distracts his young stepdaughter as he worries that his wife may never come home. “Julián lulls the little girl to sleep with ‘The Private Lives of Trees,’ an ongoing story that he’s made up to tell her at bedtime,” the book begins, setting the 98-page novella over the course of an evening. The plot is a riff on the Arabian Nights, but rather than spare Julián from his agony, words accentuate it. When Daniela falls asleep, Julián tells himself his own story, merging memory and speculation in the style of a fever dream.

Between stories about trees and recollections of lovers, Julián imagines the worst for his wife. “It’s 4:00 in the morning, and Julián reconsiders a possibility that earlier he had thoroughly rejected: Veronica is not held up on a distant avenue, but rather in the house of a man who this time has convinced her not to go home.” He vacillates between anger, loss, and negotiation. “’If we get out of this,’ thinks Julián, ’we’ll save some money and go on vacation to Valdivia or Puerto Montt, or maybe its better not to hope too much: if we get out of this we will go, on Saturday, finally, to see the snow.” While Bonsai’s narrator has the smugness of omniscience, Julián does not, and the cruelty of time lies in unforeseeable futures. Eventually, urgency gives way to dreaming, and Julián becomes a secondary character in his own story.

Private Lives is more personal than Bonsai, but it lacks its predecessor’s intimacy. If Bonsai is about how the shared deceptions of love are created and broken (“the first lie Julio told Emilia was that he had read Marcel Proust”) then Private Lives deals with the necessary fictions we create for ourselves. Sadly, Zambra doesn’t execute this as well as he could, and his attempts to build an interior world seem a shade too expository. Julián never becomes more than a stranger, and for a master literary architect, Zambra’s ending feels forced.

In a review in La Vanguardia, critic J.A. Masoliver Rodenas observed that “Zambra doesn’t make metaliterature . . . but simply reproduces the textuality of life.” Coming from a tradition of loud experimentation, Zambra’s quietude is all the more striking. In Bonsai and Private Lives the fourth wall between reader and narrator is absent, and a space is left open for those who reside within books. For his characters—and I suspect many of his readers—textuality is life, and the craft of his writing is to celebrate and lament it.

Zambra once wrote that the great secret theme of Chilean literature is the abyss between the spoken and written. In Chile, he says, writing is viewed suspiciously, and “there are many words that we say but don’t write and without a doubt many phrases that we write but don’t say.” Zambra’s work lives in this interstitial space of language, and he grapples with the silence between them, attacking the perception of literature as tomb. “If you wrote a book,” one of his character says after hearing an unpleasant anecdote, “you wouldn’t have to tell me the story you just told me.” If Zambra continues to produce writing as canny as he has, the abyss will diminish, fiction could cease to be a place to hide.

Lewis only lasted for three years, but his timing couldn’t have been better: Salomon CEO John Gutfreund (pronounced ‘good friend’) had just taken the firm public, setting off the domino effect that would soon normalize six-figure salaries—and five-figure bonuses—and play a role in the 1987 market collapse crisis. Young traders were getting in when the getting was good, and as a self-appointed embedded anthropologist, Lewis was there to watch as a profession historically regarded as tame gave way to all-expense-paid Wall Street culture. When he published his debut book Liar’s Poker the following year, the gods smiled on Lewis’ timing once again: Salomon was in the midst of its precipitous downfall, and junk bonds—a topic featured heavily in the book—were implicated in the crash.

In a 2008 essay for Portfolio magazine that would later serve as the introduction for his book on the financial crisis, Lewis laid out the central concerns motivating Liar’s Poker—the unmooring of global capital from immediate stakes; the cult of easy money growing up around deregulation, and the seemingly arbitrary individuals (such as himself) assigned as its caretakers. Picking up from earlier:

I was 24 years old with no experience of or particular interest in guessing which stocks and bonds would rise and which would fall. The essential function of Wall Street is to allocate capital to decide who should get it and who should not. Believe me when I tell you that I hadn’t the first clue.

Within months of being published, Liar’s Poker became required reading for anybody with either a passing interest in finance or the alpha male ecosystem of ‘80s bond trading. Two decades later, it’s often grouped with other rise-and-fall accounts of the period—The Bonfire of the Vanities and Barbarians at the Gate rank among its contemporaries—but as one critic observes, Liar’s Poker has long been considered “the gold standard for the genre.”

The book’s title comes from a betting game traders played on the floor, and in the opening anecdote, Gutfreund challenges a top bond trader to a $1 million bet, only to be outdone when the trader suggests raising the stakes to “ten million dollars. No tears.” This pretty much sets the mood of Lewis’ Wall Street—a high-stakes casino where the money is always somebody else’s, and fitting in means emulating a frat boy. While several critics have noted that Wall Street pay usually comes in the form of restricted stock—a policy that forces traders to have a stake in the game—it’s still tough to challenge Lewis’ free-wheeling account of ‘80s excess. In a memorable example of trading floor shenanigans, bankers steal clothes from a colleague’s suitcase before he departs on a business trip; and in another, Lewis recounts the head of the mortgage department pouring a bottle of Bailey’s Irish Cream into an employee’s jacket pockets and instructing him to “buy a new one” when the trader complains.

As a financial wonk and Berkeley liberal, Lewis’ books have the rare quality of appealing to two audiences at once: bankers and people who consider reading financial journalism on par with a trip to the dentist. (I fall into the latter camp). In Liar’s Poker, passages about mortgage-backed bonds and credit default swaps—boiled down to their most digestible essentials—are interspersed with accounts of the self-described “Big Swinging Dicks” that ran the show, casting doubt on any theories that statistical failures were entirely to blame for looming financial troubles.

Lewis once claimed that his unofficial goal for writing Liar’s was to convince “some bright kid at Ohio State University who really wanted to be an oceanographer [to]… spurn the offer from Goldman Sachs, and set out to sea.” This backfired dramatically. “Six months after Liar’s Poker was published,” Lewis writes, “I was knee-deep in letters from students at Ohio State University who wanted to know if I had any other secrets to share about Wall Street. They’d read my book as a how-to manual.”

If the cautionary aspects of the book were lost on readers, Lewis’ follow-up, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, takes pains to avoiding repeating the same mistake, and this time, he’s got a painful recent history to help him make his case. In The Big Short, Lewis returns to Wall Street twenty-one years later to pick through the ruins of the post-crash markets and figure out who, if anybody, foresaw the apocalypse and came out triumphant. This isn’t the story of the crisis per se, but an account of how financial norms set the stage for disaster, and how several savvy Nostradamuses capitalized on the fall.

The anti-heroes of The Big Short are Steve Eisman, an abrasive subprime analyst; Mike Burry, an autistic one-eyed value investor; and Charlie Ledley and Jamie Mai, a pair of absent-minded money managers who take up residency in a Berkeley garage and never quite manage to shake their outsider status. For a variety of reasons, all these men recognize early on that the subprime mortgage market is built on sand, and despite sharing the insight with anybody that would listen—including Eisman’s dentist—they are largely ignored until the housing bubble pops. This is primarily a story of personalities, and though none of Lewis’ protagonists could be described as sympathetic, viewed against the amorphous forces of Wall Street, they come across as almost endearing, or at least only mildly distasteful.

While the rest of the financial world was busy gorging itself on the booming subprime market, the central insight of Lewis’ protagonists was unnervingly basic: a bond market that had grown to half a trillion dollars in 2005 (a figure that made the stock market look like “a zit” in comparison) was fundamentally worthless. Banks had developed sophisticated systems for extending credit to people who would never be able to pay it back, and thanks to increasing complex instruments for repackaging debt, few bankers selling bonds had any idea what they actually contained. For the benefit of non-wonky readers, Lewis explains the basic logic at work in subprime mortgages:

A giant number of individual loans got piled up into a tower. The top floors got their money back and so got the highest ratings from Moody’s and S&P and the lowest interest rate. The low floors got their money back last, suffered the first losses, and got the lowest ratings from Moody’s and S&P. Because they were taking on more risk, the investors in the bottom floor [the mezzanine] received a higher rater of interest than the investors in the top floor.

Theoretically, credit rating agencies were responsible for evaluating and policing these floors, but thanks to a loophole that allowed banks to shop around for ratings—not to mention a revolving door between Wall Street and rating agencies—the name of the game became hiding risk. Math and physics PhD were deployed to create opaque financial instruments that lumped together thousands of bonds—a process unironically called securitization—and the end products, collateralized debt obligations, ended up soliciting high ratings for risky loans and keeping naked emperors bragging about their respective wardrobes. While the internal dynamics were often poorly understood among their peddlers, the products were a runaway success, and ultimately, a main culprit in the crisis. When the SEC filed suit against Goldman Sachs last April for withholding information from investors, a key piece of evidence was an obscure CDO whose creator described his duplicitous product as the work of “intellectual masturbation.”

With varying degrees of insight about the landmines embedded in the financial system, Lewis’ protagonists set out to short the subprime mortgage market, essentially betting that one of the most profitable sectors of the economy was headed for implosion. And of course, they were right. By late 2007, only several months after the industry held a self-congratulatory conference in Vegas, the market started to melt. Banks were forced—for the first time—to accurately price subprime mortgages and come to terms with a numbers that were unthinkable only several months before. Suddenly, one of the largest crashes in financial history was on the brink of becoming reality, and only a handful of investors were left to say I told you so.

It’s worth mentioning that the people at the heart of the affair—buyers taking advantage of easy loans—are virtually absent from the narrative. Apart from the occasional reference to a Mexican strawberry picker with a $14,000 income and a $724,000 home (or the Vegas stripper with five mortgages) the crisis is mediated through hedge funders and analysts; financial insiders who happened to find themselves on the opposing side of mainstream opinion. Lewis isn’t particularly interested in getting the other side of the story, but in light of how much time he spends explaining how bankers justified risky practices to themselves, it would be helpful to know what things looked like on the other side of the financial divide.

With regard to the question of blame, in some respects, Lewis’ books resemble the films of documentarian Alex Gibney, a director best known for Academy Award-winning Taxi to the Dark Side, and Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. Gibney eschews the ‘bad apple’ theory of systemic collapse, and instead hones in on how insulated cultures—financial, political, military—become perverted, continually rationalizing and disguising their own inconsistencies until the burden becomes too great to bear. While Lewis does pick his villains—John Gutfreund returns to feast on deviled eggs in the final scene of The Big Short—he also reads the subprime crash as symptomatic of deeper, culturally sanctioned flaws. Neither Gibney nor Lewis ever suggest that they see disaster coming—although sometimes the clarity of their narratives lead readers to this conclusion—but they do provide compelling accounts of how things go wrong, and more significantly, the ways in which people learn how to miss what’s right in front of them.

Since its publication, The Big Short, as with Liar’s Poker before it, has become something of a handbook for its financial age. A recent Politico article notes that the book “has been mentioned at least 15 times on the Senate floor,” and there’s been speculation that several of the SEC’s recent lawsuits have taken their cues from Lewis’ narrative. As a longtime critic of banking culture, and more recently, a politically influential one, Lewis has become a powerful voice for reform—a process that’s largely swayed between pro-business interests and populist anti-bankerism. By drawing unlikely readers into one of the most important—and abstruse—national conversations of the day, Lewis is doing his part to carve out a third path between these camps. With the long process of financial reform only beginning to get off the ground, his timing, once again, couldn’t have been better.

I’ve got new stuff up at The Believer and The New Republic. Don’t think it’s kosher to post them here yet, so I’ll just link for now.