Synopsis
In 2000, David Denby's life was turned upside down when his wife announced that she was leaving him, and he faced the threat of losing his beloved apartment in the split. Bolstered by the "irrational exuberance" of the stock market, he joined the investment frenzy with the goal of being able to buy out his wife's share of the apartment. Denby gathered courage from stock analysts, tech gurus, and lying CEOs at investment conferences. He befriended tech stars like ImClone founder Sam Waksal and Merrill Lynch analyst Henry Blodget, both now disgraced in scandals. He plunged into a season of mania, with cataclysmic results. AMERICAN SUCKER is his account of those years of madness, and then of recovered sanity, written with the rueful insights and bitter humor only a wiser man could attain.
The New York Times
Above all, this is a book about desire, not only for handsome material wealth and a comfortable, familiar home, but for love, sex, fame, fine objects (namely, a shining blue Audi sports sedan that functions as Denby's mechanical Helen, seductively beckoning him toward catastrophe and putting him on the wrong side of the old gods) and even aesthetic pleasure. In sketching his own intensely crosshatched character, so ripe for exploitation by Wall Street hucksters who played on his heady hopes about the market while suavely anesthetizing his intestinal doubts, Denby the critic reveals his tricky feelings about the movies he makes his living writing about. Mostly they disappoint him, deeply, chronically, and the soulless industrial process that creates them outrages his lofty sensibilities; but at the same time he's realistic enough to know that without the underlying profit motive the screen would go dark. Denby strikes a worldly compromise, meticulously sifting through the dreck for big-budget films that also succeed as art, then aggressively, sincerely promoting them. The system depresses him, but the system is all he has. — Walter Kirn