All the Evil of this World: A Monkey's Review

[from Chapter 1] “So why do you want to be a trader?” she asks.
“Because I’m good at math.”
“Lots of people who are good at math don’t want to be traders.”
“It’s fun.”
She half-winks at me. “How do you know? You haven’t done it yet.”
“I just know.”
“You just know,” she says, “…it wouldn’t have anything to do with the money?”
“Actually, no.”
“That’s what they all say in the beginning.”
“What do they say in the end?”
“…make it stop.”

The classic Wall Street trading pit culture of yesteryear may be shrouded in the past for many of us young finance employees, but thankfully we have Jared Dillian to transport us there in this short read about seven main characters who all bore witness to the infamous Palm (Pilot) trade in March 2000. It was the height of the dot-com bubble, and it seemed everybody was getting rich, a truly wild time in which characters and personalities could show their true colors.

Just as there are two sides to every trade, there are two sides to every conversation, and each of these seven Wall Streeters plays a role—knowingly or unknowingly—in not only the trade, but in each other’s lives. Their tales weave into one another from the coke-fueled morning haze of trading day to the moment the Palm spinoff happens, from the Pacific Exchange in San Francisco across the country to midtown Manhattan and Greenwich.

The hungry entry-level clerk out in the Bay Area, the million-miles-an-hour cokehead his boss trades with, the cynical, always-plotting investment bankers back East, the new girl on the sales desk who can’t spell but can do Black-Scholes in her head, the navel-gazing recluse in Greenwich who seems to never get anything wrong…the whole food chain is here in its nobility and its ugliness. These are humans, after all.
Jared would know all about it, and about the forces that drive their behavior, not just money but also the messy divorces, the workplace sexual tension, and the absolute neuroticism.

Why? Because he was there, and likely because he knew many people just like these characters in real life. He knows what can drive certain people and what can go through their heads during times of extreme stress, all topics he explored in his first book, Street Freak.

My personal favorite character in All the Evil of this World is Savage, a Diet Coke guzzling investment banker with a poverty complex for the ages. He makes WSO’s own IlliniProgrammer look like a spendthrift by comparison. Not only that, his workplace politicking and intellectual debates about the role of a publicly-traded investment bank are challenges to the ways we have likely all thought about our work.

And I just love his back and forth with every other character he converses with—for example, this little gem when speaking about the new girl on the sales desk:

“A 22-year-old female weirdo gets drunk with filthy animals like yourselves.”
“She’s not a weirdo, Savage!”
“She wears black fingernail polish.”

A final piece I’d like to point out is the final chapter, where we finally get to meet Weber, the reclusive Greenwich genius. Most of it follows a phone call Weber makes to someone whose name is never specifically stated, and the reader only hears Weber’s half of the conversation. I appreciated the opportunity this provided to fill in for myself what the guy on the other end of the line must have been thinking and saying. As a fellow writer, I can only imagine what a challenge this part (and this character!) was to write. Their chat, and what follows, is a highlight of the book, and it could politely be described as intense.

If you liked Street Freak, you will likely enjoy All the Evil of This World too. It is a fun, dramatic, and intellectually stimulating ride, and at just over 200 pages in length you’ll likely return to the characters’ offices just to hear them talk.

Read up, monkeys!

Order your Kindle copy here, or your paperback here.

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All the Evil of this World: A Monkey's Review

Order your Kindle copy here, or your paperback here.

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