Bank: A Novel

THE BIRTH OF BANK

The story of BANK’s genesis has a fitting analogy in the song “One Little Goat.” This crowd-pleaser, sung at the end of a Passover Seder, is about a kid which gets eaten by a cat which gets bit by a dog which gets hit by a stick which gets burned by fire which gets doused by water which gets drunk by an ox which gets slaughtered by a butcher who gets killed by the Angel of Death, etc, etc. “One Little Goat” is an illustration of cause and effect, proving that if you hang around baby goats too much, then the Angel of Death is really going to stick it to you (be warned, you Amish types). Likewise, BANK came into being through a random chain of cause and effect, beginning with a mass e-mail I sent out after six months of investment banking.

It was supposed to be a cathartic experience, a chance to rant and rave and explain to my friends and family why I had seemingly disappeared off the face of the planet. The e-mail was given the brilliantly original subject header “A Day In The Life of An Investment Banker” and was exactly that, more or less:

11:25 Starbucks.

12:30 Finish binding 60 pitchbooks.

12:45 The Defeated One is skimming through the Daily M&A Activity Update. It’s from the IT guy; he amalgamates all the porn blocked by the servers and sends it out to the junior employees. The Defeated One has just enough time to close a picture of two midgets doing disproportionate acrobatics with a pylon before Utterly Incompetent Assistant comes by asking if she can help with the binding. There are two very obvious towers of pitchbooks beside me.

1:20 Sycophant wants two sections of the pitchbooks reversed.

1:25 Utterly Incompetent Assistant gone to read the latest Shopaholic novel on her two hour lunch break. Unbind the 60 pitchbooks.

1:45 Rebind the 60 pitchbooks.

Despite these modest intentions, sending out the e-mail triggered its own sequence of events: my friends forwarding it to their friends, the e-mail getting into the hands of Samantha Grice, a reporter at The National Post who thought it would be interesting to turn the e-mail into an article on white collar sweat-shop labor, the article being published on the front page of the Arts section of that paper (including a caricature of my stick-out ears), the online version of the article being linked to by blogs around the world, aboriginal tribesmen clicking and clacking about a young i-banker’s all-nighters, this click-clack chatter eventually reaching the ears of Matt McGowan at the Frances Goldin Literary Agency, who read it and posed it to me this way: “Dave, I can’t promise you anything, and it’s going to be tons of work, but hey, it could be fun to turn this e-mail of yours into a novel.”

Considering that choosing a career based on actually getting paid hadn’t accomplished much more than a sterile apartment, a sore wrist, and expensive dinners to stall the slow but certain death of all happiness in my life, I couldn’t see the harm in putting some pro-bono effort into Matt’s suggestion. Plus, I had just decided to quit banking and pursue a second bout of cubicles in a less time-consuming position as an economic consultant.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned through all of this, it’s that you’ve got to be crazy to write a book. It’s true: Something about you just can’t be quite right. Who else would spend limitless hours typing away, grappling with syntax, fleshing out the inner psyches of Postal Boy, all for a sliver of possibility that you’ll eventually get published?

But the reward, the sweet, sweet reward: finding that final resting place for your book. Seeing your name above an elegant image of an upturned finger. Knowing that your late night typing is going to piss off a hell of a lot of people, people that you want to be pissed off. Forget Confucius: Vengeance is a wonderful thing.