BACKGROUND
I’ve always believed that fiction is an incredibly powerful tool to understand the world we live in. For example, you can learn about the opioid crisis from The Economist articles, but nothing will make it pop (in the worst way, like an ACL tear) like reading Demon Copperhead.
That’s because fiction provides the human lens - insight into people’s motivations and the context they’re forced to operate in - that animates the statistics and facts that journalism must (rightly) stop at.
So when I picked up Leverage a couple weeks back, it struck me as the satirical doppelgänger of Black Edge, the story of the insider trading scandal that (sorta but not really) brought down Steve Cohen and hedge fund SAC Capital. And after finishing it, the most salient question on my mind (which I noted in my blurb on it), as an aspiring author, was what sort of self-masochistic dude writes a satire of the finance industry when the source material is so outlandish it produces real stories like this:
A former JPM banker sued the firm, claiming that he was sexually abused by his female manager, who (allegedly) turned him into a “sex slave” and [forced him to fondle] her breasts while taunting him with barrages like: “I bet your little, Asian fish head wife doesn’t have cannons like these.”
Anyhow, the internet worked its dark magic (universal tracking has its upsides!) and, the brief blurb I shot into the ether on Amran Gowani’s Leverage somehow ended up on his desk. Amran commented on my post, we got to chatting, and he graciously agreed to answer my burning questions about who exactly tackles that type of fiction, why, and what–in the world–was he thinking.
To anchor folks, I’ve included a brief summary of the book below and the full interview with Amran after that. Enjoy!
LEVERAGE
In the world of Leverage, an ethically bankrupt hedge fund manager, Paul Kingsley, runs Prism Capital, a world-beating fund. Kingsley employs Ali “Al” Jafar, a 27-year-old who grew up with a single parent and now anchors Prism’s VICE pod, a team focused on exploiting financial trades that prey on the foibles of America’s unwashed masses.
After an investment goes south, Ali loses $300M of the firm’s money and Kingsley blackmails him, threatening to pin an insider trading investigation on Ali if he can’t miraculously recover the funds in short order. Ali, who is a competent by-the-books analyst, finds his back against the wall, unable to quit, yet unsure if there is any legal way to produce the results Kingsley demands.
INTERVIEW WITH AMRAN
KK: What’s your background and what inspired you to write Leverage?
AG: Five lives ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I was a chemistry major intent on earning a Ph.D. and becoming a tenure track professor. Best laid plans, as they say. When I figured out the academic route wasn’t for me, I found my way into the pharmaceutical industry as an organic chemist. In the hopes of broadening my career horizons, I got an M.B.A., and by circumstance rather than intent, I happened upon a job working as a junior sell-side analyst at an investment bank.
I was hired to cover the “Specialty Pharma” sector, which was basically the Wild West of the drug industry and teeming with white-collar criminals. During my three brutal years in the space, I had a front row seat to a parade of huge scandals involving price gouging, insurance fraud, accounting fraud, illegal marketing—you name it. And these weren’t “victimless” crimes. Several of the companies I followed played a direct role in precipitating and exacerbating the opioid crisis. In other words, these organizations literally killed people.
Despite all that, what shocked me the most, and what ultimately inspired me to write Leverage, was not that these horrible things happened, but that they were celebrated by Wall Street. From the outside, I’d long suspected that hedge fund scumbags and soulless corporate executives only cared about money, but seeing that reality first-hand both demoralized and motivated me. I couldn’t continue to work in such a corrupt and morally bankrupt industry, but I also felt compelled to critique and chronicle what I’d encountered.
KK: What are the struggles of writing satire set in a world where the source material is so outlandish (e.g., see aforementioned JPM scandal)?
AG: This is an interesting and complex question, and one I’ve thought about quite a bit since Leverage was published. First off, the concept of satire is widely misunderstood, even by its practitioners. The objective of satire is to critique human behavior and reveal moral failings. This is often done with exaggeration, distortion, metaphor, allegory, humor, etc., but the key criterion is that a piece of satire has a point of view.
Many people conflate outrageous with satirical, but that’s not correct. I’ve acknowledged on the record that real life is much more ridiculous than anything I could create, and the reason I wrote Leverage was to get my licks in on corporate capitalism and to eviscerate the bloodthirsty psychopaths who will do anything to make a buck.
As I mentioned, coming up with ideas that are crazier than what’s in the news is certainly a challenge, but that’s not the purpose of a satirical work. If you flip the perspective, given how craven and venal the economic and political climate has become, I would argue there’s rarely been a better—or more important—time to work as a satirist.
KK: Leverage is written from a single, first person POV from the perspective of Ali Jafar, a hedge fund analyst at Prism Capital. Did you explore other ways to tell the story?
AG: I did not, and in hindsight I’m confident the novel would not work in either the second- or third-person POV. The main reason goes back to the satirical construct: The reader needs to be deep inside Al’s head to understand exactly what he’s experiencing and exactly how he’s processing the world around him.
In particular, in the first-person POV Al gets to excoriate everything in his path—corporate corruption, insider trading, political cowardice, and the like—without the narration feeling forced or contrived. While going through his ordeal, Al would have plenty of unsavory thoughts about the current state of affairs, which allowed me, the author, to vicariously opine on all sorts of topics.
KK: Kingsley is morally bankrupt, rapacious, and extremely effective at his job. To what extent is he a composite of the characters you met in the finance industry?
AG: He’s way more sinister, way more dangerous, and much, much cooler than anyone I came across in real life—by a wide margin. To create Paul, I imagined a version of Steve Cohen or Bill Ackman who wasn’t a total weenie, and who instead looked like Paul Newman, had the intellectual horsepower of Dr. Doom, and had the moral compass of Hannibal Lecter. Luckily for us nobody like him exists, otherwise we’d be completely screwed.
KK: Were there any particular industry practices or attitudes you wanted to satirize? And, related, did you pull any punches (e.g., think anything was so ridiculous that no one would ever believe it)?
AG: First, I absolutely did not pull any punches. Among the aspects of the novel that I’m most proud of is the fact that I wrote whatever madness came to my mind and never felt afraid to tackle dark or uncomfortable topics. Despite the myriad complaints about modern-day publishing being too risk averse—many of which are valid—I was equally delighted that my imprint (Atria Books, S&S) never asked me to tone anything down or to make the work more palatable for the “average” reader. In fact, my editor loved the original draft and encouraged me to expand and enhance certain elements of the narrative.
With respect to specific practices I sought to critique, I mainly wanted to focus on the simple yet horrifying idea that destroying society is fine—as long as the financial returns are good. We’re seeing this happen now with the investment bubble in “AI”: Who cares if we destroy the planet or the economy, Bro?! There’s gold in them there hills!
Tangential to that overarching idea, I also wanted to interrogate the complicity of the political establishment: Partly via their direct participation in the corruption, and partly via their indulgence through indifference.
KK: Tell me about your research process and what books, articles, blogs, court filings (Elon vs. Twitter is a personal favorite of mine) played a role in influencing the end product.
AG: This will sound overly simplistic, but because I write about contemporary culture and capitalism run amok, I just read a lot of news. The Financial Times is my primary source these days, and I often dig into longform pieces in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Wired, Bloomberg, and the like. I also really enjoy and learn a ton from an independent media organization called Coda Story.
I never “watch” the news and I don’t use social media as a source for serious information. I do, of course, follow the online discourse to stay in the know—and for satirical and comedic purposes—and I accomplish this by subscribing to Garbage Day.
As for books and related media, I read a few nonfiction books per year—some all-time favorites include Black Edge, Moneyland, Bad Blood, and Capitalism and Its Critics—and I dabble in the occasional finance-themed podcast or newsletter. But overall, good old fashioned journalism provides me with plenty of source material and inspiration.
KK: My favorite scene in the book revolves around the hedge fund manager’s hapless son (also working at the fund—nepo baby!) explaining the terms of the blackmail to Ali and—in that very same scene!—dragging him into a surprise birthday party that he organized for him. There is a lovely whiplash sensation in that scene that echoes the larger whiplash narrative of the novel. Is whiplash, in all sorts of forms, an inescapable part of life in a hedge fund?
AG: I love that scene, too! And you’re the first person to ask me about it specifically, which is interesting.
With respect to whiplash in the hedge fund industry, the short answer is yes. The world of Wall Street is uniquely chaotic because of the daily sprint during market hours and the constant, overwhelming flow of information. Any business predicated on monitoring real-time events and requiring people to make snap decisions will induce similar feelings. I had the same experience while working as a journalist/business intelligence analyst, I just got paid a lot less for my troubles.
Zooming out, I’d argue the main reason everyone has gone insane over the past decade is because we’re all constantly being bombarded with information. Social media feeds, breaking news coverage, streaming services, newsletters, podcasts, YouTube—there’s just so much data in the world and there’s no way anyone can process it all. Each of us experiences a kind of emotional, intellectual, and psychological whiplash every single day, which is obviously not serving us well.
KK: You include an all-too-real incident where Ali feeds an acquisition rumor to a fake Elon Musk Twitter account, which immediately gets jokingly retweeted by Elon himself, driving up the stock and quickly earning Ali a couple million. Reading this, I was reminded of the Joker quote: “This town deserves a better class of criminal.” I’m curious if this free association resonates in any way for you?
AG: Definitely. I’d take the idea a step further and say: Humanity deserves a better class of human.
KK: [SPOILER ALERT] Your novel ends with the main character getting retribution against the ethically bankrupt hedge fund leader. My (admittedly under-researched perspective) is that most hedge fund skullduggery goes unpunished or under-punished (e.g., Stevie Cohen and a 2-year penalty box). Was it important to you that Ali struck back?
AG: One of the best pieces of writing advice comes from the legendary George Saunders, who said that stories should “earn” their endings. My original vision for Leverage was quite different, but as the story unfolded, Al became a fully realized character who was capable of taking the reins himself. I just let him cook on the page, and he ultimately directed me to the ending that made sense for him, which—given his odyssey—he certainly earned. In that sense, the ending of Leverage was important to me insofar as it felt authentic for the character and plausible to the reader.
All that said, you are correct. In real life, crime pays, and the villains always win.
KK: More airtime is devoted to Ali’s bodily functions (pooping / micturating / masturbating) than the main characters of the last ten novels I’ve read—combined! Michael Lewis once connected Germany’s scat-ridden national folklore to their entanglement in the mortgage backed securities (read: shit) debacle. Is there significance to Ali’s on page cleansing or are you just reminding us he’s real?
AG: This is the area of the novel people seem to struggle with the most, and I find that utterly bizarre. Al’s a human being, and human beings have all sorts of weird bodily functions, fetishes, and idiosyncrasies. In particular, Al spends a lot of time by himself in the novel—which is typically a storytelling no-no—and in order to immerse the reader in the story I needed to depict some physical actions on the page.
While I didn’t consciously set out to highlight all that stuff, it all came naturally to me during the creative process. People have to eat, drink, poop, and pee, and most of the time, men—at least—are thinking about sex. Ironically, when these facets of real life don’t make it onto the fictional page, the world and the characters can end up feeling overly fabricated.
KK: You've leveled some harsh criticisms at the hedge fund industry. Do you limit that critique to the ilk of shenanigans covered in Leverage or do you think it's a pervasive, industry-wide issue that needs to be addressed?
AG: At the risk of sounding like a complete left-wing lunatic, the issue is capitalism itself. Wall Street tends to personify capitalism's ugliest impulses, but the system's intrinsic problems plague the entire economic and financial framework we've created. In a nutshell, income inequality, societal divisions, environmental destruction, anti-democratic government policies, and the like, are features, not bugs, of capitalism. Big Tech, Big Pharma, Big Oil, among other industries, are also complicit. I would encourage everyone to read Capitalism and Its Critics by John Cassidy, which surveys the entire history of capitalist dysfunction going back to the days of the East India Company. The bottom line is that capitalism has been a shitshow since day one, and none of the critiques I leveled in Leverage are new. This fact is quite depressing on multiple fronts.
CLOSING NOTE
If you’re still reading, I hope you enjoyed the interview!
Amran is funny (in writing and in person) and I respect that he pulls no punches — and, in particular, that when I teed up a final question to basically say “Wait a second, are you putting the criminals on blast OR the whole hedge fund industry itself?” He doubled (tripled?!) down and basically said, “No bro, I’m talking about all of capitalism!”
This newsletter, with its mighty heft of 22 subscribers, is not going to wade into that epic debate (yet), but if you enjoyed the chat and want to follow along with Amran’s work, check out his newsletter Kleptocracy Korner and his social media accounts.
Thanks for a great interview!
And glad you enjoyed LEVERAGE!