In the middle of A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism, a debut novel by Peter Mountford, at what might be the climax of a love affair — the moment of declaration and commitment — a young American journalist called Gabriel (who is not quite American and not really a journalist) sits with Lenka, his lady love, on her son’s neatly-made bed. Lenka happens to be the press secretary for the newly-elected president of Bolivia, Evo Morales, and before he fell in love with her, Gabriel regarded her as a promising source of inside information. He still does. 

He … wondered how he could say what he thought he should say, that all the sweet norms of romance — the bashful presentation of flowers, the holding of hands in a dim cinema — did not seem appropriate for them. But their relationship was alive and passionate and it thrived especially in the absence of any of that pro forma schlock. Their place was up in his hotel room, with cake and wine, at a slight remove from the world below. Still, there was more — or there was potential for more. He loved her and she loved him and he was even falling for her family, and if they — he and Lenka — were an unconventional couple, so be it. Maybe it could be strange and wonderful. But he didn’t know how to say these things. Instead, he said, “I really like it here. I really do.” And he nodded earnestly as he said it, staring at the toys in Ernesto’s room.

“But he didn’t know how to say these things.” This inability, reflective of a pervasive lack of moral clarity, is as much a part of the novel’s atmosphere as  the thin air of La Paz. It is, even, an element of Peter Mountford’s style. We are told what Gabriel is thinking but also that he does not know how to put his thoughts into words. This can mean many things — Gabriel could be one of those men who is seized with doubt when called upon to make important speeches, or his thoughts might be nowhere near as clear as Mountford’s presentation of them — but it doesn’t really matter what the problem is, because the result is the same: Gabriel doesn’t tell Lenka how much he loves her, and he doesn’t tell her because he doesn’t know how. We might wonder, in the aftermath of Mountford’s very sad story, why someone as bright and clever as Gabriel should have trouble saying those three little words, but the specific explanation for that doesn’t much matter, either, because, ultimately, Gabriel’s incapacity traces back to a failure of the world in which he has been brought up to teach him what he needs to know. He’s already in Bolivia because of that larger failure, lying to everyone he talks to about what he’s doing there and trying to believe that his ends will justify his means. Gabriel’s brain is like a high-performance engine into which someone has poured a tankful of inadequately refined fuel. 

Peter Mountford has written his novel as a cautionary tale for intelligent young men who might be chafing the pressure to make more of themselves — or at any rate to make more money. Don’t do it, he urges. Don’t sell your soul to the devil because one too many of your classmates has gotten rich on Wall Street. Don’t think that you can do a bad thing for just long enough to build up a nest egg on which retire to a long life of blamelessness. Don’t try to persuade yourself that, because the victims of your crime are in pari delicto, you’re not  committing a crime. Mountford has ardently fleshed out these warnings with the story of Gabriel’s folly. And by sparing Gabriel the more melodramatic punishments — be sparing him, as might be said, any real punishment at all — the author intensifies his ultimate desolation, cut off from the two women who mean most to him. 

The artistic price of this appealing achievement is an indistinctness about Gabriel, who is callow, somewhat laddish, but likeable withal. It’s a combination that will make the novel easy to adapt for the screen, but it’s also one that diminishes the reader’s satisfaction. Gabriel is an average sensual man with a few spikes of talent. There is nothing evil about him, but his outlook is so perennially fogged by low-grade cynicism that he no longer notices the murk, and he is a largely complaisant user of other people. The confusion of his own origins, which might, in another character, inspire rigorous adherence to clear standards of conduct, makes Gabriel agile at the situational contortions of moral relativism. His Chilean mother fled her homeland under Pinochet, for Russia of all places; toward the end of her sojourn there, she became  pregnant by a Russian man whom she has never identified to the son subsequently born in the United States. Gabriel therefore has a number of ways of looking at himself at his disposal, and he has been taught by his liberal, ivy-league world to keep his options open. It is as though every vital moral inoculation has been withheld from his formation. 

This novel would have been stronger if Mountford had jumped to one side or the other of Gabriel’s fence. Making him more of a villain would have satisfied readers who believe that each of us is, in the end, responsible for his own behavior. Presenting Gabriel’s background at more generous length would, in contrast, have affirmed other readers’ belief that we are, in the end, responsible for one another. In this latter reading, the cautionary tale would have been aimed at teachers and bankers and everyone else who might have fought to stiffen Gabriel’s too-supple backbone. Making Gabriel a ruthless, stop-at-nothing industrial spy would have heightened the excitement and burnished the ending with a kind of black glee, but I don’t think that this approach was ever really available to the author. He likes Gabriel too much, and he wants us to like Gabriel, the better to enter into his miguided schemes. Most of all, he wants us to feel awful about Gabriel’s personal losses — and in this he succeeds with surpassing brilliance. In an epilogue of fewer than a dozen pages, Mountford gives us a portrait of his gentleman several years later that chills our sympathetic disposition almost to the point of tears. 

He’d given up cigarettes too when he’d quick smoking. He’d also quit coffee and other drugs. But he knew he didn’t look especially well either. Despite all the exercise and the mainly vegan diet, his complexion was sallow. His hair had thinned on top and was streaked with gray. He had lost even more weight. He had permanent dark bags under his eyes. All of this he blamed on a combination of circumstances, including perpetual jet lag, unpredictable diet, and the fact that he could never get accustomed to a bed; also the wages of aging, chronic stress, watching too much hotel television at night, and relentless loneliness.

In other words, Gabriel is aware that he is paying a high price for his promotions at the hedge fund where he now runs private equities, and for which he briefly thought, long ago and far away, that he had extracted a generous tip from his beautiful lady love. 

I can well understand an author’s shying away from trying to pin Gabriel’s misjudgments on a general social failure, but surely some of the extensive depiction of La Paz might have been traded in for more about Gabriel’s growing up. Did he pay attention in school? He seems to have worked hard on some game theory experiments as an undergraduate, but, once out in the world, his industriousness appears to have been dented — which is what made the hedge fund’s easy money so attractive. Gabriel is obviously a lost young man, and to grasp the extent of his disorientation we need more in the way of a map. Here’s hoping that our fine young writer’s next novel is somewhat less equivocal.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 19th, 2011 at 6:00 pm.