It’s come to this. FT Alphaville has been reading Hedge Fund Wives, Tatiana Boncompagni’s sickly novel about, err, hedge fund wives.
The WSJ have the first chapter serialised here, but you can actually get the first six cliché-drenched chapters here on the HarperCollins website.
The whole project smacks of a pot-boiler conceived in times of excess and then hastily re-written to suit changed economic circumstance, but that’s not what Tatiana says in the Q&A at the end of the extract:
I had just finished writing my first novel, Gilding Lily, which is about a group of New York socialites who are driven by their desire for fame and status, and I wondered what would happen to the social swirl here in the New York if there was a sharp economic downturn, because most of the fund-raissers and parties are paid for or underwritten by luxury goods retailers and investment banks. My assumption was that if these businesses went belly up, so would the good times…
But then the author goes and gets her tenses all wrong with a Top Ten Hedge Fund Wife Must-Haves…
1. Eff-you diamond engagement ring. This can have many variations, but the ring of choice includes not one, but three flawless, colourless diamonds amounting to no less than eight carats.
2. Van Cleef & Arpels Alhambra necklaces. Heap them on, ladies!
3. Extensive collection of exotic skin handbags and shoes, designer clothes and furs, plus a climate-controlled, thousand square-foot closet to house it all.
4. Multimillion-dollar art collection. For shame if Christie’s doesn’t already have a dossier on you.
5. Refrigerator stocked with face and body creams based on your own DNA, bottles of vintage champagne, and 1/2lb tins of Beluga caviar.
6. Pilates instructor, personal stylist, lawyer, dermatologist, masseuse, architect, acupuncturist, astrologer, psychiatrist, bodyguard, and vagina trainer, all on speed dial.
7. Full-time, live-in domestic staff, including household manager, housekeepers, driver, nannies (one per child), and personal chef.
8. Table at the annual Robin Hood Foundation benefit; co-chairmanship of at least one A-list fundraising event.
9. Private jet or regular invitation to ride on someone else’s, ditto for super yacht vacation to St Barth, Cap d’Antibes, Monaco, or Portofino.
10. Chalet in Aspen, Beach house in the Hamptons, Palapa-roofed winter getaway on Mustique. Bonus: Pied-a-terre in Paris, plus a front-row seat at the Chanel Haute Couture show.
Etcetera…
Who said the Journal was dumbing down?
Related links:
Profit, Passion – WSJ book review
Tatiana Boncompagni’s blog