According to its publishers, John LeFevre’s Straight to Hell is a shocking insider exposé of the banking industry. And if you didn’t think that bankers were competitive, money-obsessed, over-entitled and out for themselves, then you will indeed be shocked.
It is perhaps a moot point whether all bankers are as racist and sexist as John LeFevre; if they sleep with as many prostitutes, or belittle and demean their female colleagues as routinely as he does. But then, on some levels, Straight to Hell is less a shocking insider exposé of the banking industry than it is of the publishing industry.
In the author’s note at the start of the book, LeFevre explains how, in 2011, he read a Daily Mail story about an anonymous Twitter account, @CondeElevator, “that hilariously chronicled the most ridiculous conversations overheard in the elevators to the infamous Condé Nast building”. A few drinks later, he explains, he decided to set up @GSElevator: “Things heard in the Goldman Sachs elevators do not stay in the Goldman Sachs elevators.” The premise was simple: “to illuminate Wall Street culture in an entertaining and insightful way”.
This is a book, it turns out, based on a Twitter feed that was a rip-off of another Twitter feed. And if that is not quite tenuous enough, LeFevre didn’t actually work at Goldman Sachs. A “Note on the Author” at the end of the book explains that: “In 2010 he was hired by Goldman Sachs to be head of debt syndicate in Asia, a position that he eventually did not take due to a contractual issue.”
He chose Goldman Sachs, he says, because “of their position as public enemy #1 and people’s fascination with ‘vampire squids’.” Huh? No, me neither. And then there are the nuggets from the Twitter feed that led to the book deal, which start each chapter: “My garbage disposal eats better than 99% of the world.” “Every year, children learn a valuable life lesson: Santa loves rich kids more.” “Some chick asked me what I would do with 10 million bucks. I told her I’d wonder where the rest of my money went.”
It’s unclear why anyone thought this would make a book, or who would want to read it, but in detailing his own background (a preppy east coast boarding school), LeFevre explains that it was reading Michael Lewis’s Liar’s Poker that inspired him to enter banking. So if you know of an over-privileged public schoolboy who dreams of earning so much money he will one day be able to rain notes off a balcony in a Filipino shopping centre just for the sheer entertainment of watching poor people scrabble to scoop them up, this is the book for him.
Other highlights include the time he wakes up next to a “smoking hot chick” but has no idea who she is. “I lift the covers further for a more detailed inspection. Holy shit. Nice. Still alive? Nice… she is definitely hot. Is she a whore? I ask myself.” It turns out she is, only – horror! – he’s got no cash on him. There’s no way he’s doing the walk of shame down to the ATM, he says, so he pays her with the contents of the minibar.
I suspect that this is one of those anecdotes that might be better not written down. But then, this is a book that might have been better if it was not written down.
Straight to Hell is published by Grove Press (£11.99). Click here to buy it for £9.59
