Overview
Unabridged CDs - 6 CDs, 8 hoursThis stylish and hilarious novel about the lives and loves of well-to-do young Manhattanites beginning their first year on Wall Street is destined to become one of the year's most buzzed-about debuts.
Synopsis
This stylish and hilarious novel about the lives and loves of well-to-do young Manhattanites beginning their first year on Wall Street is destined to become one of the year's most buzzed-about debuts.
Blackbook
Bret Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney meet Scott Fitzgerald and P.J. O'Rourke... [in this] coruscating, veil-piercing portrait of the American ruling class.
Editorials
Blackbook
Bret Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney meet Scott Fitzgerald and P.J. O'Rourke... [in this] coruscating, veil-piercing portrait of the American ruling class.Bloomberg News
Mergers & Acquisitions deserves to be a hit...nobody involved in finance should miss it.Blueprint
Funny and pointed... Vachon captures the little moments of truth that the young and rich are too busy BlackBerrying to notice.Financial Times
Wickedly funny and smartly written...Enormously entertaining and revelatory. And, like the best first novels, it holds the promise of much greater things to come.New York
Like Bright Lights, Big City and The Devil Wears Prada, M&A is a fictionalized account of the moral hazards of high-status Manhattan professional life.New York Daily News
M&A is a fictionalized account of the underbelly of New York's financial world.People
A funny romp.The New York Times
A fizzy first novel of investment banker high jinks.Washington Post
[A] smart, satisfying roman à clef ...The story is fast-paced, and his overblown characters are wildly engaging.Publishers Weekly
Vachon's debut novel, the subject of frenzied speculation and assiduous hype, arrives on audiobook at the crest of a wave of excitement. Heyborne reads Vachon's brand-name, corporate-name-heavy prose with satisfaction, pounding on each punch line and luxury brand with panache. While it is jarring to hear him mispronounce the names of high-profile New York law firms, undercutting Vachon's brand of masters-of-the-universe realism, Heyborne captures the novel's mixture of high-stakes capital and comic psychological insight. Heyborne's voice, soft and often pleading, is the precise opposite of the rapacious hypercapitalists the book drizzles across its pages, but the juxtaposition works for the most part. Vachon documents, rather than celebrates, the world of finance his book inhabits, and Heyborne's reading further dilutes any sense of romance that might still cling to its Gordon Gekko manqués, chasing after that ever-elusive dollar. Simultaneous release with the Riverhead hardcover (Reviews, Jan. 8). (Apr.)
Copyright 2007 Reed Business InformationLibrary Journal
Tommy Quinn, a recent Georgetown graduate with family connections, lands a job with the prestigious New York investment banking firm J.S. Spenser. He quickly finds himself out of his depth but is loath to fail and lose his perks. Soon, everything unravels, and low satire turns to high farce. Tommy makes major mistakes at work and watches helplessly as his hard-working, Red Bull-drinking colleague goes into cardiac arrest trying to get him out of the mess. He falls into sweet, gentle love with the stunningly beautiful Frances, daughter of a prominent New York family, who devolves into a wrist-cutting depressive. Home videos of the whip-snapping sexual escapades of his amoral buddy, Roger, are viewed by thousands when incorporated into a media art installation at a MoMA exhibition party. In a last-ditch effort to protect his standing at the firm, he aligns himself with the easier-going South American branch, but this proves epically disastrous when leftist terrorists scale a private yacht and kidnap his new boss. This yuppie debut novel, written while Vachon was himself an analyst at J.P. Morgan, is an over-the-top Bright Lights, Big Citycoming-of-age story for the 21st century. Recommended for large fiction collections. [See Prepub Alert, LJ12/06.]
—Sheila Riley