Matt Levine: @GSElevator Author's Book Is Mostly Terrible, Unless You Want To Be John LeFevre
John LeFevre, he of a twitter handle that once purported to be brought to us live from an elevator at Goldman Sachs, has written a book based on said twitter handle, @GSElevator. Is it good? According to Matt Levine's review over at Bloomberg Businessweek, not so much! Well, if you've never in your life read, heard, or witnessed firsthand stories about bankers, brokers, or financial services hacks doing things with hookers, blow, or hookers and blow, and can get past the "strenuously bro-y" writing, Straight to Hell: True Tales of Deviance, Debauchery, and Billion-Dollar Deals might be of some interest. Plus, "the bond market stories are pretty good." But:
...you don’t want to read about bond deals. You want drugs and hookers. LeFevre delivers them with overwhelming force. He and his buddies are drunk seemingly every night and most afternoons. They blow a year’s bonus on a week in Saint Tropez. They make PowerPoint presentations to rank the hotness of their female colleagues. They have hotel staff kick prostitutes—sorry, “love monkeys”—out of bed for them. They scream at maids for throwing out cocaine. Genitals touch things genitals shouldn’t touch. LeFevre pays a hooker in hotel minibar bottles, crashes a Maserati, and poops on a small plane. It gets a little tedious.
In addition to the repetitiveness of the tome, Matt is also worried that LeFevre's book will spawn millions of baby LeFevres:
LeFevre feeds the public’s hunger for proof that Wall Street is full of degenerate sociopaths, while also glamorizing that degeneracy. Those inclined to hate bankers will have their suspicions confirmed. Those inclined to whoring and cocaine will see a career opportunity. The rest of us—including many bankers—might worry that the worst bits of Wall Street’s culture are being passed down to the next generation. Teenage boys at Choate will want to be investment bankers after reading Straight to Hell. Which is probably the point.
A New Wall Street Memoir Full of Hookers, Cocaine, and Other Cliches [BloombergView]
