Executive Times
		2007 Book Reviews
		Mergers and Acquisitions by Dana Vachon
Rating:			*
		(Read only if your interest is strong.)
		Click on title or picture to buy from amazon.com
	Vacuous There are a dozen or so laughs on the 300 pages of Dana Vachon’s debut novel, Mergers and Acquisitions. Vachon, who worked at JP Morgan after his 2002 graduation from Duke, had some work experience on which to base this tale of twenty-somethings, their relationships and their work life. The characters are weak, stereotyped and undeveloped; the plot is imaginative and unrealistic, but not captivating; and overall, the writing is unimpressive and the novel is vacuous. Here’s an excerpt, from the beginning of Chapter 3, “Mascaras, Bahamas,” pp. 45-49: My father always meant well, and over dinners at Christmas and Easter would tell my brother and me that he saw it as his personal duty to make sure that we both went to heaven upon our deaths. That he would be there waiting for us was always assumed. He was thrilled when they accepted me at Georgetown, a Jesuit school, unwavering as he was in the opinion that the Catholic Church, even as it played host to more pedophilia than Neverland Ranch, was mankind’s best hope for redemption. I’ll tell you plainly that, more than anyone I’ve known, my father had a vested interest in redemption, and not just for himself, but really for my older brother, who had died, and therefore had to be in heaven, or to not be at all. I’ve only recently stopped holding this heaven fixation against him. There are far worse religious obsessions at play in the world, and after spending a year watching the news of all these jihadists and born-agains and promised-landers, I’ve begun to see that man isn’t likely to get over God anytime soon. We expect too much of God, and too little of ourselves. I read in an article on the BBC website that God is more or less built into the genetic code, that we can’t help ourselves, that if you put someone in a muddy gorge, you can be sure that he’ll find something to worship, and with a little time, something to revile. So maybe my father can’t be helped. I see that now, but didn’t back then. Especially when he sent my younger brother Mickey away to boarding school with the Benedictines, and happily wired the Brothers twenty thousand dollars each September for all that they might do throughout the school year to minimize Mickey’s future stay in purgatory, which, like man’s need for redemption and my father’s secure place in heaven, was never questioned. I felt terrible for Mickey when they took him out of the local high school and packed him off to Portsmouth Abbey. He didn’t talk to Mom or Dad for his first two months up there, but he called me on Sundays when he was allowed to use the phone. I could hear his muffled sniffling as we hung up, but he said it wasn’t so bad. At the very least it made our father feel as if he were doing his part as a spiritual guide, which was important. On a day-to-day basis things were difficult for him. The years at Cravath were by far his best; in those days he would return home from work just as I went to sleep and bound into my bedroom, pick me up, and spin me around until I was dizzy. I would press my nose against his suits from Brooks Brothers, smell the city, think of how much I loved him, and listen to him tell me how much he loved me. Then it all went wrong. He left Cravath and started from scratch and began to stutter. “Tyut, tyut, tyut!” he would spit at strange places in his sentences, and then stretch his eyes in surprise at the strange virus that had infected his speech. The early career that had once been a lifetime’s achievement became a reminder of promises unfulfilled, potential untapped. We never wanted for anything, but there was no more bounding through the door. He came home tired, and he would watch old broadcasts of the British Open in perfect silence for a few hours before really talking to anyone. He didn’t want us to ask him about his day. He did well, as I said, but never well enough, and certainly never as well as he would have liked. He began to worry about money in the way that semi-wealthy people do. Sometimes he would bring it up out of nowhere. “If I just had another two or three million, Tommy! Just another two or three! I’d buy tax exempts and that would be it. . .“ Just another few million would fix everything, because his aspirations generally exceeded our immediate means, and the difference between the two caused him great pain. (An economist would say that this is the case so that the aspirer will stop aspiring, and the pain will go away, but economists assume lots of things that don’t always pan out, as I would later learn in Latin America.) Soon he was fully usurped by this new and unhappy self, so that by the time I graduated from Georgetown the entire family went to great lengths to salve his ego. It was hardest on my mother, whose own father had willed her a few million dollars a decade earlier. My mother’s inheritance stalked my father as a personal phantom, whispering always and everywhere that the finer elements of our family’s lifestyle were financed by her, not him. After I graduated from Georgetown, Dad paid a hundred thousand dollars to join the Harbour Island Club near our beach house in Rhode Island. The club membership was his eighth, and brought our family’s annual golf and tennis dues up just past the seventy-thousand-dollar mark and far past the point of affordability. My mother didn’t have the energy to object. My father wouldn’t have cared anyway. What really bothered him was the idea of playing golf as a guest, instead of as a member at this club. He had worked too damn hard, in his own words, not to have a golf club by his beach house. But selfishness is a sin, so he told Mom that he was joining as a gift for her—even though the woman plays no golf or tennis, to my knowledge—and wrote out the check. Mom loves Dad despite all of his flaws, and forgave him even this. People can become strangers to each other over time, and when she had married him he was full of optimistic ambition and prospering at Cravath and she was starting an English PhD at Columbia. My mother walks with a slight limp, the result of one leg receiving the signal to stop growing just a bit later than the other. My father had helped her to the subway one morning, and was quite taken with her, and they had fallen in love, or some approximation thereof. I’ve found that to really know someone by chance, just for a moment, is an incredibly lucky thing, but not all that strange. Sometimes you get thrown together with someone, and just because of the circumstances you know what’s going on in their head, and they know what’s going on in yours. To keep this going is the real feat. Because one morning you might have a thought that leads you one way, and they might have a thought that takes them in another. And words can only do so much. Sometimes I think you can become estranged from someone without ever leaving their side. As the years went on my father’s dormant flaws became active and dominant. Mom dropped out of school after receiving her master’s degree to have kids and raise us, and although she volunteered at the Rye Free Reading Room her life outside of this single activity was entirely a subset of my father’s. She never told him that she was unhappy with their arrangement, but she did have a tendency to develop mysterious stomach ailments on the eves of parties and benefits, and she often sent him off to them alone, knowing that his rigid faith in the risen Christ would keep him from straying too far. But she couldn’t always bail out. So when Dad joined Harbour Island she strapped on a battered Gucci bag and navigated the welcoming parties for new members of the club. She stooped to chatting about nothing at all with women from Greenwich and Palm Beach, in whose graceful company she and her widely observed (never discussed) limp had never felt entirely at home. She cursed these damn meet-and-greets with such fervor that I almost thought she would say something to him when he vetoed her plans for a quiet Fourth of July in favor of an evening of cocktails and chatter at the club. Instead, she drank Chardonnay and polished her diamonds. She didn’t have it in her to explain herself to him, and anyway, they had stopped speaking the same language years before. It all made me consider myself quite lucky to have the job at J. S. Spenser, where I wouldn’t be doing any great service to humanity but would at least gain financial independence and a little karmic distance from the old man. I privately fantasized about making so much money on Wall Street that my own life would be free of my family’s strange, confused class identity. Dad acted like a new father when Spenser hired me. He took me to Brooks Brothers for new suits, and then to the Union Club for dinner, and that was where he told me how proud he was of me, and I thanked him, and we were both quiet and awfully disappointed. The exchange had been a letdown, and that was when I first suspected that words can sometimes fail us, that they can conscientiously object or simply desert if asked to bear a cargo of particularly noxious thought. So we sat in extended silence, my father looking into my eyes and around my face, like he was trying to find something. He’s worn the same round, tortoiseshell eyeglass frames since 1968. Their succession of lenses had thickened over the years and that night I saw him only as two blurry puddles of color, amplified and distorted. As he squinted into me I didn’t have to ask what he was looking for, or how the search had gone. The only one of us he ever took to the Union before that had been my older brother, Alastair. If you enjoyed the excerpt, you’re likely to enjoy the rest of the book. If you love to read novels with business backdrops, or the travails of late adolescence and young adulthood, you’re likely to enjoy Mergers and Acquisitions. Otherwise, take a pass. I endured to the end, but by the last page, I could have cared less about what happened to any of the characters, and I was no longer amused. Steve Hopkins, August 25, 2007
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