Peter Mountford: A Young Man's Guide To Greed and Good Intentions
Peter Mountford contains multitudes: he’s a novelist who’s also worked in finance. For his debut book, A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism, he parlays his knowledge of economics into a captivating tale about a conflicted American in Bolivia and a hedge fund’s high-stakes hijinks. If you’ve ever wondered what it might be like to be in the head of the kind of person whose economic knowledge and predictions might cause harm to an entire country—and, given the events of the past couple of years, who hasn’t—this is the novel to read.
Fiction writer Reese Okyong Kwon and Mountford first got to know each other as fellow waiters at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in 2009; more recently, they talked about escapism, moral maps, overseas love, and literary heroes.
In A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism, your American main character, Gabriel, travels to a place that’s foreign in a variety of ways: geographically, professionally, morally. Do you think that the fact that he’s abroad by himself makes it harder for him to hold onto his moral map?
I hadn’t thought of it in those terms before, but I think that yes, being abroad loosens Gabriel’s connection to his moral center. I’ve found that one of the experiences of traveling to a very foreign country on work is that your identity can get a bit blurry, because you become anonymous. To the staff at the hotel, you’re that guy in room 8774. That’s it. The things that define you at home, not just your friends and family, but your home, your objects, the patterns that you have arranged for your life, once you’re separated from all that, you can begin to feel a bit ghostly and reckless. Las Vegas is founded on that feeling.
So, I don’t think Gabriel would have done what he does if he were in the United States at the time. I think he’d be scared to do it, for one thing, scared of getting arrested, but I also think that, by being more in touch with his identity, he would have some insurmountable misgivings.
Gabriel’s an engagingly complicated character, one who extends the rich tradition of literary protagonists who cause more harm than they intend. How did he come to you—how did you come up with him?
I’m hesitant to admit that he’s drawn somewhat from my life considering some of the dubious decisions he makes. Really, he’s a bit of me, a bit of some friends, a bit invented; that was how he started: ingredients in a pot. But, you know, eventually the ingredients sort of meld into something else, something different from the sum of the parts.
In terms of the mayhem that he causes, I had initially, rather blandly, envisioned him having a moment of clarity in the middle of the book, after which he’d enact a scheme to stick it to the hedge fund that had hired him. But then I remembered that people only behave that way in Hollywood movies.
Or in our fantasies.
Right. So I tried to think about what I would do in his position, if I were in my mid-twenties, suddenly making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for job that involves traveling the globe in style, studying countries and writing about them. Moral misgivings aside, I can’t see how I’d have the courage to quit (at least not until I had amassed a nice pile of money), let alone sabotage the hedge fund that had hired me.
Yeah, sometimes I wonder if people ever really change. And yet Gabriel seems to be surrounded by strong, high-minded women who become increasingly frustrated by his choices. Do you think they’re justified in their disappointment, or are their expectations unrealistic?
Oh yes, they’re justified. That said, they’re hardly saints themselves. People seem inclined to think his girlfriend Lenka is this heroic character, because she’s not greedy, per se, but really they’re not nearly so different. His goal, ostensibly, is money, and hers is the success of this politician Evo Morales, but in the end they’re both the same animal, or at least they’re playing the same game in the same way. They’re each hardening and learning how to play at the top of their game.
