Celia Mcgee

BEGINNER’S GREEK
By James Collins
Little, Brown, 472 pages, $23.99

Now here’s a pretty fairy tale: The hero is reasonably handsome, chronically kind, invariably sensitive, excruciatingly honorable, infallibly Ivy League—and he helps invent the hedge fund! What a prince! What a savior of mankind.

Have you ever met a hedge-funder like that? I thought so.

Let us be clear—or let James Collins be clear, which he certainly is in this first novel, whether analyzing stocks or human heartbreak—young New Yorker Peter Russell’s breakthrough insights are not considered by his creator to be financial. They are minted instead when the girl of his dreams—or at least his social and romantic calculations—makes him a winner at the perilous game of airplane seat bingo: On a flight to Los Angeles, they fall in love-at-first-sight. Though they agree to meet again, he screws up, she marries someone else, that someone else is his best friend, his best friend dies the night of Peter’s wedding and—innumerable clever portraits of countless related characters later—Mr. Collins awards Beginner’s Greek the ending it has earned.  read more »

Danielle Ganek, one-half of a powerful collecting couple (her husband is hedge-funder David Ganek), isn’t the most obvious candidate to write a novel stripping the paint off the art world.  read more »