This book is guy’s chick-lit. It’s a revenge fantasy of a junior analyst in investment banking. And it’s not very good. It’s probably an accurate portrayal of what life as a junior analyst in the industry is really like, but it just wasn’t very interesting.
David Bledin was a junior analyst in an investment banking firm a few years ago. His family and friends had issues with how much time he spent with them, and so he wrote a day in the life of an investment banker
email to them, full of caricatures of his co-workers who he worked with, from his sycophantic boss to the utterly incompetent assistant to the defeated one, a fellow junior analyst. It being pretty funny, his friends forwarded it around, and it made the internet rounds. An agent or an editor or something got hold of it and asked him to write a book based on it. Ta-da! Here’s Bank.
While the email was funny, the book feels like a Saturday Night Live sketch turned into a movie. Great at short length, tedious at in a longer form. For those in the industry, this will be hilarious as hell. I would buy and treasure something similar about software development (hello Microserfs!), it just wasn’t interesting to me as a non-banker. On top of that, the book really felt like it was putting me in the shoes of a wanna-be victim. It’s not a spot I want to be in.
Oh, before I close, I spose I should include a brief plot synopsis. Bank is the story of Mumbles (no names are given in the story for any character), a junior investment banker. He works long hours for assholes for a lot of money. He and his co-workers attempt revenge at some of their tormentors. Mumbles gets involved with the Woman With The White Scarf (a lawyer in another firm in the building) who he meets at the coffee shop downstairs. We see the trials and tribulations of his attempts to get ahead, their attempts at revenge, and his attempts at love. Will he survive for his planned two years before moving on?
Title: Bank
Author: David Bledin
Imprint / publisher: Back Bay Books / Hachette Book Group
Format: Advance readers copy
Length: 293 p.
Publication date: May 2007
ISBN-10: 0-316-01673-X
ISBN-13: 978-0-316-01673-5
Subject: Investment bankers — Fiction
Subject: Success in business — Fiction
Subject: Self-realization — Fiction
LC classification: PS3602.L45B35 2007
