Mergers & Acquisitions (Hardcover)

A graduate of Duke University in 2002 and an analyst for J.P. Morgan for a few years after that, Dana Vachon is a writing wunderkind along the lines of Jay McInerney in Bright Lights, Big City and Bret Easton Ellis in Less Than Zero. However, the similarity ends with the theme of young guys on the razzle, because Vachon's protagonist, unlike his predecessors, observes and learns without falling into the honey pot. Tommy Quinn graduates from Georgetown and lands a job with J.S. Spenser, an investment banking firm. His major was Interdisciplinary Studies, a kind of Liberal Arts wastebasket, and he knows nothing about finance. In the brain-deadening Spenser training program he hooks up with Roger Thorne, a really crass human being, but one who knows all the moves. The genesis of the friendship sets the tone rather well: They are both wearing Gucci loafers and Rolex watches.

The story begins at Roger's engagement party, with Tommy waiting for his erstwhile girlfriend Frances to arrive. Everyone thinks that she has been at a spa, but she has really been in an upscale Home for the Unsure, being ministered to by a freaky shrink. The story then moves backward through Tommy's ruminations about meeting Roger, "the John Audubon of preppy flesh," and about connecting with Terence Mathers, Spenser's guru of mergers and acquisitions. At the end of Mathers's first speech to the new Spenserites, Tommy says: "We had all partaken of the capitalist Kool-Aid and the applause was as much a tribute to the stupidity of young men and women after four years of elite education as it was to the success of Spenser's training program." Greed is definitely good in this atmosphere--the more the better--but Tommy is not really a full-fledged participant. After Tommy blows his first assignment, he and Roger are sent to Cabo San Lucas on a major deal. What happens there is life-threatening and hilariously over-the-top but perfectly plausible and moves Tommy to rethink his life path. Vachon has left his own fledgling financial career behind, and instead has written a first-rate first novel that is smart, funny, witty, and wise. --Valerie Ryan

Greenwich, Conn.–bred Vachon did a stint at JP Morgan after graduating from Duke, an experience that no doubt influenced this dizzying romp through investment banking heaven and hell, which rises and falls among numbing corporate indoctrination, pressure-choked deadlines, fabulously swank parties and an obscenely over-the-top business junket complete with kidnappers. At the heart of it all is Tommy Quinn, an upper-middle-class kid from Westchester whose Georgetown degree in Interdisciplinary Studies leaves him bereft of finance know-how. No matter, once Tommy hooks up with Princeton grad Roger Thorne (who has a real pedigree, a reputation for sexual prowess and a hot sister), and the two pursue careers based mainly on smoke and mirrors. Vachon's glee in poking fun at this complex, debased world is evident in his purposefully excessive descriptions of sex (particularly Roger's "dude"-laden monologues), drugs and ruthless execs, but there's a certain amount of drooling involved, too, in the intricate descriptions of jewels and bonuses. Tommy's romance with Frances Sloan, a troubled trust fund heiress, is predictable (though still diverting), and his and Roger's careers (along with several gratuitous deaths that mark them) have denouements and aftermaths that feel forced at best. Imagine a tyro Jay McInerney without the pathos and the been-there, done-that offhandedness. (Apr.)
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M&A is a fictionalized account of the underbelly of New York's financial world. -- New York Daily News

Mergers & Acquisitions deserves to be a hit...nobody involved in finance should miss it. -- Bloomberg News

A fizzy first novel of investment banker high jinks. -- The New York Times

A funny romp. -- People

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. -- Blackbook

Funny and pointed... Vachon captures the little moments of truth that the young and rich are too busy BlackBerrying to notice. -- Blueprint

I've always maintained that what we know as 'the 80s' never really ended, and Mergers & Acquisitions proves the point in spades. A Bright Lights Big City for the generation born around the time that Bright Lights Big City came out, Mergers & Acquisitions is a coming-of-age novel with a very nice balance of heartfelt insight and acid satire-including one of the funniest jerks I've ever encountered (in fiction). -- Kurt Andersen, author of Heyday

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

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. -- Financial Times

[A] smart, satisfying roman ˆ clef ...The story is fast-paced, and his overblown characters are wildly engaging. -- The Washington Post

"In one slim volume [Vachon] updates the 1980s canon Bright Lights, Big City, Barbarians at the Gate, and Bonfire of the Vanities, taking readers into the depths of a young man's ordeal inside a thinly disguised Wall Street firm."
-- Newsweek

"A witty and entertaining immorality tale which should earn Vachon many fans, if not necessarily among his friends and family."
-- Jay McInerney

"A funny romp."
-- People

"Dana Vachon exposes the carnal and financial lusts of his generation's privileged and ambitious as few others have in recent years."
-- Candace Bushnell --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

A stylish and hilarious novel about the lives and loves of well-to-do young Manhattanites in their first year on Wall Street, destined to become one of the year's most buzzed-about debuts.

Mergers & Acquisitions is the story of Tommy Quinn, a recent Georgetown grad who has just landed the job of his dreams as an investment banker at J. S. Spenser, and the perfect girl, Frances Sloan, the daughter of one of New York's oldest moneyed families. As he travels from the most exclusive ball rooms of the Racquet and Tennis Club to the stuffiest boardrooms of J. S. Spenser, from the golf links of Piping Rock to the bedrooms of Park Avenue, and from the debauched yacht of a Mexican billionaire to the Ritalin-strewn prep-school dorm room of his younger brother, he finds that the job and the girl are not what they once seemed.

Sharply written, fast-paced, and bitingly witty, Mergers & acquisitions is a compulsively readable story of Manhattan's young, ambitious, and wealthy. Set against the backdrop of money, lust, power, corruption, cynicism, energy, and excitement that is Wall Street, it is suffused with an authenticity that only an author who lives in that world can provide. A former investment banker at J. P. Morgan, Vachon offers an insider's point of view on the financial scene, and he knows the moneyed turf of Manhattan inside out.

Dana Vachon was born in Greenwich, Connecticut, and raised in Chappaqua, New York. He attended Duke University, graduating, as he claims, "cum nihilo" in 2002. Following graduation, Vachon landed a job at J. P. Morgan as an analyst and began work on this novel. His writing has appeared in the International Herald Tribune, Men's Vogue, The New York Times, and Salon.

Tommy Quinn is out of place. He is a young, not so ambitious man starting out in the financial world who is surrounded by wealthy and oblivious people, from his bosses to his circle of acquaintances. He tells his story through a wonderfully written first-person account in this debut novel. It succeeds as a poignant, often hilarious coming-of-age story. Narrator Kirby Heyborne crafts perfectly appropriate voices for the characters, including a benevolent and gregarious Indian man, a Latin boss, air-headed men and women, and a sad girlfriend. The best characterization, though, is given to an especially shallow friend, whose dialogue keeps the reader chuckling. Long live hedonism and laugh-out-loud writing. Vachon is here to stay. Lets hope he and Heyborne team up again. M.B. © AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.