The LA times review

BOOK REVIEW
Money talks

Novel owes a debt to Marx

By Carolyn Kellogg
August 19, 2007

LET’S get this straight, right off: Marx never wrote like this. Then
again, Marx didn’t concern himself with architecture or sex or
Corsica. But Viken Berberian does in "Das Kapital: A Novel of Love
and Money Markets."

The challenge of taking your title from an iconic treatise is that it
can’t help but intimidate readers. Do you have to (re)read that old
"Das Kapital" to get this one? Thankfully, no. The story focuses on
two men, each a true believer in his own way, and the girl they both
fall for. It’s snappy and romantic on top, theoretical down below.

Wayne, a wealthy Wall Street fund manager, is in futures, and maybe
anti-futures. Falling somewhere between Gordon Gekko and Spock, he is
predatory, soothed by numbers, conscience-free and just barely human
enough to be smitten by Alix, an architecture student living in
Marseille. She’s a beautiful cipher dating a Corsican. The Corsican,
as he’s known, yearns for an uncorrupted world; his deepest emotions
can be stirred by the bite of a red ant.

Berberian begins audaciously, with Wayne: "The surrounding landscape
was a concentration of glass and steel, vertical gulags lost in the
clouds below. Facing his electronic terminal, he felt like he was in
the cockpit of a fighter jet, a creature of pure movement and speed."
Nervy to set him up as a jet among skyscrapers — tasteless, even.
But evoking the 9/11 attacks foreshadows the terrorism that factors
into the plot.

Soon Wayne casually destroys the company the Corsican works for, and
the latter takes matters in hand: "I leave for New York City
tomorrow. I am supposed to meet him inside the MetLife Building, that
icon of capitalism condensed; beacon of betrayal to us, symbol of
prosperity to them." The Corsican’s straight-outta Marx dialogue
reads either funny or annoying.

Footnotes keep the book from getting too smart, both elucidating
points in the text and poking fun at the use of footnotes. The jokes
don’t stop there: Wayne orders avocado sandwiches that arrive,
repeatedly, without avocado, sending him into outscale, profanity-
laced rants.

The Corsican and Wayne form a dangerous alliance. Each woos Alix (a
most precious commodity), alternating work on their plan with the
pursuit of romance. But each remains superficial, and as a
consequence the book’s satire is undermined by its lack of dramatic
tension.

The whip-crack writing owes a debt to Don DeLillo, loaded as it is
with naked dialogue, obliqueness and a penchant for repetition.
Words, phrases cycle back until patterns emerge.

If only sharp prose and carefully crafted satire were enough. These
characters are propelled by their roles in the historical dialectic
instead of compelled by emotion. The story is empty at its center,
like one of Wayne’s sandwiches. *