Dog Eat Dog
Andrew Lipstein, The Vegan
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 208pp, £18.99, ISBN 9781399602594
reviewed by John Hay
Herschel Caine, the 38-year-old protagonist of Andrew Lipstein’s new novel, The Vegan, is in trouble. He may have, indirectly, killed someone. Or almost killed someone. At the beginning of the book, during a small dinner party in his impressive Brooklyn brownstone, Herschel secretly slips a sleeping aid into the drink of his wife’s old college roommate, a loudmouth lush hogging the conversation, in the hopes this would ‘accelerate her jet lag’. But when this suddenly somnolent guest departs for a cab, she groggily stumbles over the sidewalk and cracks her skull, sinking into coma from which she will never awake.
Is Herschel responsible? Should he confess? No one, not even his wife, Franny, knows what he did, and he worries that telling her will multiply the burden of guilt by simply replicating the same dilemma for her — without improving the victim’s fate. Or is he just rationalising the desire to conceal his crime? (‘I was guilty of a terrible mistake of judgment,’ he admits to himself — then quickly qualifies it: ‘but only in hindsight’) This opening disaster is not merely the occasion for a hypothetical moral exercise; it triggers a profound midlife crisis — maybe even a psychotic episode — in an otherwise proudly ascendant money manager, a millionaire investment banker poised to corner the market with his new algorithmically enhanced hedge fund, Atra Arca Capital Management. For what other travesties might Herschel be responsible?
Though briefly of the belief that his company’s experimental algorithm will make him a billionaire overnight (‘impossibly, unimaginably wealthy’), he unfortunately learns that the program created by his tech-savvy colleagues is criminal rather than magical, illegally manipulating the markets. The twice-guilty Herschel is walloped by remorse and finds he can no longer stomach meat or dairy, effectively converting to veganism. (In a recent interview in Vulture magazine, Lipstein revealed that he himself was affected by a similarly sudden and visceral conversion to vegetarianism.) Is his conscience killing him? Or is it propelling him into an admirably more virtuous state? In any case, he’s losing his mind. He starts to feel a new communion with canines, emotionally bonding with the neighbour’s dog, and a love for lizards, impulsively purchasing a set of anoles from a pet store. At a low point, he takes a nighttime jog to the Prospect Park Zoo, climbs over the fence, and strips down naked in front of a red panda, whose reaction he finds ambiguously validating.
The Vegan works well because Herschel is an interesting narrator — manic and manipulative but also remorseful and introspective. He begins the novel as an intensely vapid defender of greed, a wannabe Gordon Gecko who owes something both to the self-destructive bluster of John Self, of Martin Amis’s Money, and to the psychotic status-consciousness of Patrick Bateman, of Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho. An aggressive social climber and a student of trends and fashions, Herschel strives for ‘a balance between supper club restraint and carnal greed’, mildly obsessing over the menu items at fancy restaurants and even trying to recreate them at home. (He regrets attempting ‘a needlessly complex and desperate beef Wellington’) He’s perfectly at home in a dog-eat-dog world; as an alpha male, he privately worries that his future child (he and Franny have decided to try) will have ‘submissive tendencies’. He would like us to think that this account of his spiral out of control is a mere anomaly, an unfortunate deviation in an otherwise blameless life. But his casual gestures to excessive drinking and childhood trauma betray deeper issues in his character.
Herschel is also an older and more compelling version of Caleb, the 27-year-old Brooklynite narrator of Lipstein’s debut novel, last year’s Last Resort, an entertaining account of an aspiring author who pens a bestseller by stealing the story of a friend. Both Caleb and Herschel belong to what the latter recognises as a type in the business world: ‘the guy with more than enough cunning to make a decent living, but too much to ever do it the right way.’ But whereas Caleb constantly needed to confess and receive absolution, Herschel is much more interested in taking action to repair the wrongs he has caused (even if his personality will almost certainly lead him to commit more wrongs in the future). He wants to be a martyr, to be held accountable and to pay for his sins, but, at the same time, he knows he has very little chance of being perceived as contrite. Even Herschel’s sudden veganism has more to do with personal punishment than with social policy. His new physical inability to eat meat is only, it would seem, by happy coincidence a feature of a superior moral approach to life.
The Vegan is an impressive successor to Last Resort, a stylistically stronger work that establishes the 35-year-old Lipstein as a notable young English-language novelist. The tone of the novel is pitch perfect, that of a slick entrepreneur and snobbish elitist, a man who reads the classics after dinner and then scoffs at their bullshit at breakfast: ‘Sure, it was good with a few glasses of wine, but in the morning it didn’t mean anything.’ The plot is a page-turner, a gradually unravelling disaster that irresistibly invites a rubbernecking reader. And the larger questions lying in the background — are algorithms ethically neutral? Can profit be generated without predation? — are a compelling mix of the timely and the timeless.
In the end, The Vegan pleasingly harks back to an old novelistic tradition of privileging moral crisis. Lipstein offers a rumination, if not a critique, on the contemporary phenomenon of ‘virtue signaling’, the perverse competition, rampant on social media, among liberals to display the most progressive, the most altruistic, the most self-sacrificial behaviour — to one-up the do-gooder next to you. Is a cosmopolite vegan morally superior to a humble BBQ patron? Probably! Unless that vegan is also a murderer, a liar, and a thief.
Is Herschel responsible? Should he confess? No one, not even his wife, Franny, knows what he did, and he worries that telling her will multiply the burden of guilt by simply replicating the same dilemma for her — without improving the victim’s fate. Or is he just rationalising the desire to conceal his crime? (‘I was guilty of a terrible mistake of judgment,’ he admits to himself — then quickly qualifies it: ‘but only in hindsight’) This opening disaster is not merely the occasion for a hypothetical moral exercise; it triggers a profound midlife crisis — maybe even a psychotic episode — in an otherwise proudly ascendant money manager, a millionaire investment banker poised to corner the market with his new algorithmically enhanced hedge fund, Atra Arca Capital Management. For what other travesties might Herschel be responsible?
Though briefly of the belief that his company’s experimental algorithm will make him a billionaire overnight (‘impossibly, unimaginably wealthy’), he unfortunately learns that the program created by his tech-savvy colleagues is criminal rather than magical, illegally manipulating the markets. The twice-guilty Herschel is walloped by remorse and finds he can no longer stomach meat or dairy, effectively converting to veganism. (In a recent interview in Vulture magazine, Lipstein revealed that he himself was affected by a similarly sudden and visceral conversion to vegetarianism.) Is his conscience killing him? Or is it propelling him into an admirably more virtuous state? In any case, he’s losing his mind. He starts to feel a new communion with canines, emotionally bonding with the neighbour’s dog, and a love for lizards, impulsively purchasing a set of anoles from a pet store. At a low point, he takes a nighttime jog to the Prospect Park Zoo, climbs over the fence, and strips down naked in front of a red panda, whose reaction he finds ambiguously validating.
The Vegan works well because Herschel is an interesting narrator — manic and manipulative but also remorseful and introspective. He begins the novel as an intensely vapid defender of greed, a wannabe Gordon Gecko who owes something both to the self-destructive bluster of John Self, of Martin Amis’s Money, and to the psychotic status-consciousness of Patrick Bateman, of Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho. An aggressive social climber and a student of trends and fashions, Herschel strives for ‘a balance between supper club restraint and carnal greed’, mildly obsessing over the menu items at fancy restaurants and even trying to recreate them at home. (He regrets attempting ‘a needlessly complex and desperate beef Wellington’) He’s perfectly at home in a dog-eat-dog world; as an alpha male, he privately worries that his future child (he and Franny have decided to try) will have ‘submissive tendencies’. He would like us to think that this account of his spiral out of control is a mere anomaly, an unfortunate deviation in an otherwise blameless life. But his casual gestures to excessive drinking and childhood trauma betray deeper issues in his character.
Herschel is also an older and more compelling version of Caleb, the 27-year-old Brooklynite narrator of Lipstein’s debut novel, last year’s Last Resort, an entertaining account of an aspiring author who pens a bestseller by stealing the story of a friend. Both Caleb and Herschel belong to what the latter recognises as a type in the business world: ‘the guy with more than enough cunning to make a decent living, but too much to ever do it the right way.’ But whereas Caleb constantly needed to confess and receive absolution, Herschel is much more interested in taking action to repair the wrongs he has caused (even if his personality will almost certainly lead him to commit more wrongs in the future). He wants to be a martyr, to be held accountable and to pay for his sins, but, at the same time, he knows he has very little chance of being perceived as contrite. Even Herschel’s sudden veganism has more to do with personal punishment than with social policy. His new physical inability to eat meat is only, it would seem, by happy coincidence a feature of a superior moral approach to life.
The Vegan is an impressive successor to Last Resort, a stylistically stronger work that establishes the 35-year-old Lipstein as a notable young English-language novelist. The tone of the novel is pitch perfect, that of a slick entrepreneur and snobbish elitist, a man who reads the classics after dinner and then scoffs at their bullshit at breakfast: ‘Sure, it was good with a few glasses of wine, but in the morning it didn’t mean anything.’ The plot is a page-turner, a gradually unravelling disaster that irresistibly invites a rubbernecking reader. And the larger questions lying in the background — are algorithms ethically neutral? Can profit be generated without predation? — are a compelling mix of the timely and the timeless.
In the end, The Vegan pleasingly harks back to an old novelistic tradition of privileging moral crisis. Lipstein offers a rumination, if not a critique, on the contemporary phenomenon of ‘virtue signaling’, the perverse competition, rampant on social media, among liberals to display the most progressive, the most altruistic, the most self-sacrificial behaviour — to one-up the do-gooder next to you. Is a cosmopolite vegan morally superior to a humble BBQ patron? Probably! Unless that vegan is also a murderer, a liar, and a thief.