Ten Years in the Tub (111 page)

     
  
Whoops!: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay
—John Lanchester

     
  
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
—Mark Twain

N
o time spent with a book is ever entirely wasted, even if the experience is not a happy one: there's always something to be learned. It's just that, every now and again, you can hit a patch of reading that makes you feel as if you're pootling about. There's nothing like a couple of sleepy novels, followed by a moderately engaging biography of a minor cultural figure, to make you aware of your own mortality. But what can you do about it? We don't choose to waste our reading time; it just happens. The books let us down.

It wasn't just that I enjoyed all the books I read this month; they felt vital, too. If you must read a biography of a sitcom star, then make sure the sitcom is the most successful and influential in TV history. You have a yen to read about a grotesquely dysfunctional communist society? Well, don't mess about with Cuba—go straight for North Korea. John Lanchester's
Whoops!
is a relatively simple explanation of the biggest financial crisis in history; Mark
Twain's
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
is, according to Hemingway, the book from which all American literature derives. A month of superlatives, in other words—the best, the worst, the biggest, and the most important.

And, as a digestif, David Eagleman's
Sum
, which invites us to contemplate forty varieties of afterlife. It's such a complete package that it seems crazy to carry on reading, so I may well stop altogether. I'm not giving this column up, though. It pays too well.

Stefan Kanfer's
Ball of Fire
contains an anecdote which seems to me to justify not only the time I spent reading it, but the entire genre, every biography ever written. Kanfer is describing the early days of Ball's relationship with Desi Arnaz, which was stormy right from the off:

            
Almost every Sunday night ended with a furious argument about each other's intentions and infidelities… It happened that two of the town's greatest magpies witnessed many of the quarrels. F. Scott Fitzgerald and his inamorata, columnist Sheilah Graham, used to watch the spats from Fitzgerald's balcony.

F. Scott Fitzgerald used to watch Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz fighting
? Why didn't I know this before? If this story is true—and there's no reason to doubt it—then all is chaos. No biography can be left unread, just in case there is a gem like this lying there, undiscovered, within its pages. Maybe Thomas Pynchon repeatedly bangs on Sarah Michelle Gellar's wall because she plays her music too loud! Maybe Simon Cowell and Maya Angelou are in the same book group!

The reason Kanfer's book works so well, and why it throws up so many good stories, is that Ball, like the fictional Mose Sharp and Rocky Carter in Elizabeth McCracken's brilliant
Niagara Falls All Over Again
, took the long road through the American pop-culture century. She worked in theater, film, radio, and TV. She dated Henry Fonda, worked with the Marx Brothers, knew Damon Runyon. A washed-up Buster Keaton helped her with her physical comedy. She found out that she was pregnant by listening to Walter Winchell on the radio—he'd obtained the information from the lab technicians even before they passed the information on to Ball's doctor. She attracted the attention of HUAC, the House Un-American Activities Committee, because she'd registered with the
Communist party in 1936 primarily to humor her socialist grandfather. Hers was an extraordinary journey, and just in case you need a little more, there was a long, tempestuous marriage at the center of it. (Ball rendered the first divorce from Arnaz null and void by jumping into bed with her ex-husband on the way back from the courthouse.) We didn't have a Lucille Ball in the U.K.; you have way more female comediennes than us. This is not a coincidence.

There wasn't any logic behind my decision to go straight from
Ball of Fire
to the banking crisis, although John Lanchester's
Whoops!
(published in the U.S. as
I.O.U
.) certainly bolstered the sense of elegiac melancholy that lingers after you've said goodbye to Lucy and Desi and the Golden Age of Television. We now have more to worry about than the end of wholesome, nation-uniting family sitcoms; it turns out that the Golden Age of Everything is over. One of Lanchester's contentions is that “Western liberal democracies are the best societies that have ever existed… Citizens of those societies are, on aggregate, the most fortunate people who have ever lived.” I'll be comparing and contrasting with North Korea a little later, but when you consider that one of the indicators of poverty in the U.S. and the U.K. is obesity, you can see his point. Nobody is obese in North Korea.

Now, however, the citizens of the U.S. and the U.K. have some bills to pay. One authoritative market commentator puts the cost of the bailout in the U.S. at just over $4.5 trillion—a number “bigger than the Marshall Plan, the Louisiana Purchase, the Apollo moon landings, the 1980s savings and loan crisis, the Korean War, the New Deal, the invasion of Iraq, the Vietnam War, and the total cost of NASA's space flights, all added together—repeat, added together (and yes, the old figures are adjusted upward for inflation).” If you were thinking of knocking on the door of a government body because you're looking for a little help with your video installation… well, I'd give it a few weeks. Here in the U.K., the government is looking to make an unprecedented and almost certainly unachievable 25 percent cut in public services; we need to find in the region of £40 billion a year simply to service our debts.

There are plenty of numbers in
Whoops!
Most of them are scary, but some are funny, if your taste in humor leans toward the apocalyptic. In a brilliant chapter about the catastrophic failure of the mathematical models of risk used by
bankers and economists, a chapter entitled The Mistake, Lanchester introduces us—well, me, anyway—to the notion of the sigma, a measure of probability. “A ‘3-sigma event' is something supposed to happen only 0.3 percent of the time, i.e., about once every three thousand times something is measured.” According to the mathematical models, the 1987 Black Monday crash was a 10-sigma event; this means that, were the life of the universe repeated 1 billion times, it still shouldn't have happened. And yet it did. During the recent crash, the CFO of Goldman Sachs claimed that he was seeing twenty-five sigma events “
several days in a row
.” (My italics, but I'm sure I'm italicizing for all of us.) Lanchester tries to give us some sense of the numbers involved here, but it's basically hopeless: “Twenty sigma is ten times the number of all the particles in the known universe; 25-sigma is the same but with the decimal point moved fifty-two places to the right.” Even if we presume that there are three particles in the known universe—and I'm no physicist, but I'm guessing that three is probably on the low side—then the number is still impossible to grasp. And these people saw events on this scale of incomprehensible improbability happening every day for a week. They would presumably also have been staggered by Brazil winning the next World Cup, on the basis that they didn't win it yesterday or the day before or on any of the four and a half thousand days since their last victory, in 2002. (For those of you who don't follow soccer: Brazil are quite good. They always have a decent chance of winning the World Cup. But the World Cup takes place only every four years, so… Oh, forget it.) Meanwhile, the reality underpinning the numbers and the credit swaps and the securitization was a whole bunch of people who had been persuaded to take out mortgages that they couldn't afford, and had to pay more for them than people with a credit history and a job, because they were riskier. One thing that had never quite sunk in for me is that, for Wall Street and the City, subprime mortgages and junk bonds are Good Things—or used to be, anyway—so it wasn't as though the unscrupulous were hiding shoddy goods under the more-attractive stuff. The shoddy goods were attractive, and they wanted in. The higher the risk, the more money you make. Lovely. And the bankers thought they'd fixed it so that this risk had no downside, ever, for anyone. Securitization and its trimmings were, almost literally, alchemy, as far as the banks could tell.

One of the reasons
Whoops!
has done well in the U.K. is that John Lanchester is One of Us. He's not a financial journalist; he's a novelist, and a critic, and an outsider when it comes to this stuff. His dad was a bank manager, though, and he has the necessary interest, and the necessary anxiety. I watched
Inside Job
this month, too, and between them, Lanchester and Charles Ferguson have achieved the impossible, and made me feel… not knowledgeable, exactly, but at least I can see the dim light of comprehension breaking somewhere over the horizon. I don't know you personally, but I'm sort of presuming that you know more about the Decemberists and Jennifer Egan than you do about Gaussian copula formulas. Is that right? If so, then this is the book for you.

Nothing to Envy
is a book about what happens when an economy fails completely, to the extent that there is nothing left—no work, no infrastructure, no food, no anything. I bought it after a forceful recommendation from a friend, and after it won a nonfiction prize in the U.K., and I wasn't sure I'd ever read it. But on the very first page there is a startling satellite picture of the Korean peninsula, taken at night, and I was hooked in. In this picture, the South looks like the U.S. or the U.K. or just about any twenty-first-century country, mottled with light from its cities, and great puddles of the stuff in the area around Seoul. In the North, it looks as though someone has a single candle burning in the capital, Pyongyang. Much of North Korea has no electricity. It's packed up. It went sometime in the early '90s, and it never came back. Sometimes—typically on the birthday of the Great Leader—it wheezes back into life for an hour or two, but the rest of the time North Korea is lost in a blackness of its own making.