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.
My insight is that we hope to be like the guys he writes about - and that's because the protagonists of Flash
Boys are living the wet dream of 21st Century work. First and most
importantly, they have the chance to do something societally moral and meaningful,
something on the side of right – fixing a broken system. They get that
chance of redemption even if they haven’t been consciously seeking it out, in some cases. For those of us
who know the pain of doing work that probably doesn’t make any difference in
the world at all, and if it does there’s a fair chance it’s on the wrong side,
this would be fantasy enough.
In addition, though, the guys that are in
the team Lewis introduces have meaning in their own work on an individual
day-to-day basis. They are repeatedly shown as having autonomy - to use their
analytical/investigative/programming talents to their utmost, to think
independently, to have the time to experiment and process ideas and make
mistakes, even. They are engaged with work that uses their skills.
And their individual value is recognized!
And appreciated! Lewis is very good on thumbnail vignettes of interpersonal
interaction, and repeatedly we see “odd” characters that maybe didn’t fit in or
were seen as “difficult” at other jobs being given a chance in this team and
having their oddness be seen as positively an asset, or at the very least a
trait ignorable because of the rest of their expert strengths. For anyone
sitting at a computer feeling undervalued or distanced from colleagues, this is
the sort of wish fulfillment we fear is out of reach. A key example is the
one-off appearance late in the book by Josh Blackburn, an employee at the new
“fair” IEX stock exchange: He gets to transfer what he loved doing at his old
job in the military to being able to be genuinely valuable at the new one by
producing a data visualization tool for his boss – on his own initiative! – and
receiving the boss’s gratitude for solving a problem before it was even
officially brought to the employee. To be honest if this were fiction, I would
say this section is an unnecessary hammering home of the theme (as well as being
pretty unrealistic and an unhealthy manager-managee relationship – trying to
preempt dominant guy’s wishes from stuff he sort of hints at around you? yuk)
but in a non-fiction story I guess it also helps demonstrate the complexity of
what the team are up against.
The fantasy is topped off by the fact that not
only having these characters bonded to serve a greater good, but they’re
rewarded for it, both financially and in the form of increased status – we are repeatedly
told about headhunters and more lucrative job offers from elsewhere – although
of course, their loyalty and team belief keep them as part of the gang.
This is work as shown by Michael Lewis in Flash Boys: a beautiful ideal where effort is rewarded and goals are clear. It's work that's more like the job descriptions on recruiter
pages and corporate mission statements than the common reality. Despite the fact that most of us don’t have this meaningful, engaging,
well-respected and well-remunerated work, there’s whole life-coaching and headhunting industries
(not to mention the entire neoliberalist socioeconomic construct) telling us
that this is the aim – that we can not only make money from our efforts, but
gain life fulfillment through doing our part in the capitalist engine room - and many of us still hope that it’s possible,
somewhere, with the right company or the right team. We dream of meaning.
What Lewis has created, therefore, is the
office-worker equivalent of Bridget Jones’s Diary – an addictive fantasy about
what we are told to desire (which may not be what we actually desire). In this
case, it’s meaningful, autonomous, well-regarded work rather than self-respect
and a boyfriend, but the principle is pretty much the same: The reader is encouraged to put themselves in the place of the protagonists, to see these happy-ever-after dreams as nearly attainable from their own lives.
The question is, if Helen Fielding was
working to a basic romance pattern of “girl gets scumbag-girl loses
scumbag-girl gets hero”, what’s Lewis’s narrative template? I saw Michael Lewis
speak about this book earlier this year and his “hook” in the talk and in interviews
I’ve read is the team leader and guy that starts the investigation off, Brad Katsuyama – the
“nice Canadian who didn’t want to be a radical” as Lewis sketches him. That may,
possibly, be a good marketing ploy but – and I am pretty sure Lewis himself
realizes this - it’s not a true reflection of the way the book plays out.
Emphasizing Brad Katsuyama suggests that the overriding narrative is one man’s
changed path, a “Hero’s Journey”. I would argue that it’s not. Instead the trope we’re looking at
here is “Team on a mission”.
While Bridget Jones famously updates the classic
romantic novel to the Twentieth Century, Lewis has created what is possibly the
first “white-collar Western”[1]
for the Twenty-First. Instead of Pride
and Prejudice, the source material contemporized here is Seven Samurai, or a variation like Firefly. Brad Katsuyama isn’t Luke
Skywalker: he’s Captain Mal, seeking out the best quirky characters for the job
and standing by his code of honour until it makes him into a rebel almost despite himself.
Don't believe me? This is a group of guys with
different skills banding together out of variously chequered pasts to do good
for the helpless underdogs (well, big investors, but we don't care at this point) against the better-resourced, predatory bandits
robbing them all - and coming out respected and at least partly victorious. If
it were any more of a Western there’d be a saloon. Hell, you could pretty much
assign the team members the standard Magnificent Seven roles
with a bit of glossing.[2]
(Also like a traditional Western? Women are nearly entirely absent, though
apparently they’re being just super-supportive offscreen as their menfolk take risks.)
Now, all of those things are fictional and
Lewis is telling a true story. And I’m absolutely positively sure that all his research is solid and is all the clearer for being given in digestible form – I
do actually feel I understand now something about why speed was (and is) so
important and how HFT and ‘dark pools’ screw the system. But the shape of the
narrative – what details we get about the characters, which aspects of the
journey’s difficulties are highlighted – is in the service of a team-up story
that also functions as worklife fantasy. And that’s OK.
Just as the pulp Westerns were, even if
based on real characters like Wyatt Earp, creating a myth of proud manliness and freedom
from authority even as most readers knuckled under in cities and factories, now
Lewis has created a myth that us regular white-collar schmucks can tell
ourselves on the morning commute, about how one day we too might get our freedom
to do meaningful, respected, expert work and take on the bad guys. The fact that he's done that while teaching us who some of the bad guys might be? Well that's just plain talent.
I love this book – for the new understanding gained as well as for the tantalizing hope that work like this can come true – but like most of its characters I enjoy
puzzling out things that don’t make sense, and in this case, it was why I started thinking of Seven Samurai and Bridget Jones, at the same time. That solved, I’m
satisfied - and I hope that if Michael Lewis reads this, he’ll not be too
annoyed at the references to fiction, but know that I like and admire the book
even more for the cunning with which the journalist-style investigation and the
addictive myth are woven together into a seamless, readable whole.
[1] Nothing seems to come up on Google for this as a genre. I’m
claiming it – and now Lewis has done it, I’m sure there’ll be more, it seems to
fit the zeitgeist!
[2] Maybe a follow-up post. No time to track down the names in the book
right now. Go ahead, if you want. I’d say Ronan’s probably both the Funny One
and the Lancer, at first glance.
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