PRIVATE EQUITY

A memoir about the alluring world of high finance.

“No one…Yes, that’s right, no one has ever voluntarily left Carbon.” So says the pseudonymous billionaire behind a pseudonymous Manhattan hedge fund that showed every promise of making him the world’s first trillionaire. Sun recounts how she took a job as a personal assistant to “Boone Prescott,” which required her to be available around the clock and to “make the world work for Boone” in whatever way he saw necessary. To call Prescott a control freak is to undervalue the term, but Sun found herself falling into a sort of corporate fantasy world in which he was one of the good capitalists, an illusion that she eventually shed even after working hard enough to land her on a therapist’s couch. The author is candid in acknowledging that she was a willing participant for far too long, giving up what she really wanted to be—a writer—in order to take part in a lucrative but draining world in which the boss slowly transformed into Gordon Gekko (“Carrie, remember, money can solve nearly everything”). There’s a Devil Wears Prada dimension to the narrative, which becomes increasingly grimmer as it goes, and a few self-indulgent moments, while doubtless cathartic for the author, make for tiresome reading. On the whole, however, Sun’s memoir provides both a measured account of how soul-devouring the corporate world is and of how employees as well as bosses are complicit: “I became in­terned in a reality in which succeeding at Carbon took me further away from the self I had longed to set free….The trauma plot and the capitalism plot are increasingly the same plot. Each one rewards you for staying inside the other.”

Middling, but still a useful cautionary tale about the dangers of unfettered capitalism and unquenchable greed.