The seductive appeal of Michael Lewis’s
book about high-frequency trading on Wall Street – and the group of guys that got together
to investigate and make the system fairer – is not merely the promise of
learning more about the financial system and getting angry at how screwed up
and misaligned the incentives are, although you will do that.
Obviously Lewis’s writing is a major part of it –
the elegant effortless surface only partially concealing the structural and research muscle underneath, so that I am put in mind of a sleek but powerful mammal, an otter perhaps, or a mongoose.
Others have written very good reviews of
the book as a whole (I’m a fan of John
Lanchester’s, for instance). But what I want to talk about here is the
structure, the narrative arc. I know that teaching people about the system, its problems and potential
solutions is important for Lewis because that’s what he talks about in multiple
interviews – and because anyone with any sense of justice or fairness should be
outraged and want to know more about how the system has been rigged.
But
putting that complex explanation into a form that is not just simply expressed but has forward narrative momentum – that’s important too, or
no matter how good the writing is people won’t keep reading. It came to me
in a revelatory flash 12 hours after finishing the book (at 4am, I’m hoping
this is one of those ideas that survives post-insomnia) that what Lewis has
produced here – the sugary flesh helping us to swallow the hard seed of an idea
that he wants to spread - is an aspirational fantasy as powerful (and as
fictional in its way) as any 'Twilight' or '50 Shades'. The fantasy, though, is
targeted not at romance-seekers but at disillusioned white-collar workers.
