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Extravagance: A Novel - Hardcover

Krist, Gary

 
9780767913300: Extravagance: A Novel
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0767913302 ISBN 13: 9780767913300
Verlag: Broadway Books, 2002

Inhaltsangabe

In a novel that unfolds simultaneously amid the frenzied speculation and technological innovation of seventeenth-century London and late twentieth-century New York, an energetic young man heads from the provinces to the city to make his fortune. 25,000 first printing.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

GARY KRIST is the author of two story collections -- The Garden State and Bone by Bone -- and the novels Bad Chemistry and Chaos Theory. He reviews books regularly for The New York Times, Salon, and The Washington Post Book World, and frequently writes satirical op-eds for The New York Times. He lives in Bethesda, Maryland with his wife and daughter.

Aus dem Klappentext

William Tobias Merrick, an energetic young man from the provinces, travels to the big city in a time of great optimism and ferment, hoping to make his mark on a frenzied, money-crazed society obsessed with the promise of new technologies.

The city in question is London in the 1690s; but it is also New York in the 1990s. The new technologies are diving bells, pneumatic winches, and "sucking-worm" drainage engines; but they are also wireless telecommunication devices, patented biotechnology processes, and revolutionary electronic Internet routers. Only the sense of unlimited possibility remains the same throughout.

Unfolding simultaneously in two distant--but remarkably similar--periods of history, Extravagance is a comic, pictaresque novel of financial mania, the story of a world gripped by a terminal case of irrational exuberance. Navigating the perils of both eras is a single cast of characters: Will himself, a young man on the make, eager to do whatever it takes to make his fortune; Will's uncle (and sponsor) Gilbert Hawking, a shrewd businessman with one foot in the Old Economy and one in the New; Benjamin Fletcher, the developer of a pioneering new technology destined to set the world on fire; and Theodore Witherspoon, the cheerfully unscrupulous wizard of the financial markets who promises to make them all wealthy beyond their dreams.

Meanwhile, Will's aspirations are complicated by his pursuit of Ben Fletcher's sister, Eliza, the gorgeous and disconcertingly aggressive woman who is as desirable as she is elusive. Can Will succeed in his efforts to win both Eliza and the fortune that her brother's new technology seems likely to bring him? And can he make it all happen before the general euphoria of the age reaches its inevitable climax?

Extravagance is a uniquely conceived work of high comic entertainment -- an ultra-smart time machine of a novel that proves that both love and greed are timeless.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

1

In September of the year 169-, I, William Tobias Merrick--twenty years old and possessed of more sense and education than prospects--was sent from my father's house at Exeter to live with my bachelor uncle, a prominent wine merchant of Wapping, near London. It was thought that I, being the fourth son in a family whose brickworks would only comfortably support three, might learn something there of the shipping trade, my uncle's connexions in this area being quite extensive. Neither my father nor my uncle saw fit to consult me in this matter. Having assumed that any young man should welcome the chance to work amid great seagoing ships, they regarded my opinions as settled beforehand. Thus it never came into their consideration that I disliked the sea above all things, and had once resolved, during an intolerable bark crossing from Cardiff to Portishead some years past, never to set foot on the boards of a ship again.

Wapping--as viewed from the horse cart sent to fetch me upon my arrival day--seemed a foul and smoky place. Ships of all sizes lined the blackstone wharves along the Thames, groaning under rank-smelling cargoes of charcoal, wool, indigo, tea, and all else imaginable that a seaworthy craft might hold. The high street, such as it was then, was thronged with a considerable array of humanity--watermen and sailmakers, lightermen and coopers, not to mention members of the other trades, both respectable and not, associated with large river ports. As one reared amid the quiet lanes of Exeter, I knew at once there would be novelties here to fill a year of idle Sundays. And see them I would. Suspecting my uncle to be a man much engaged in his business--and one who might regard his obligations to me as more sentimental than actual--I anticipated his having but little time for my supervision. Thus did I hope to be left largely to my own devices, free to set off into the streets and there occupy myself in the manner of any young man new to the city and eager to take a Dutchman's draught of life--that is, I would take myself to the coffee-houses and the theatres and the taverns, though without much idea of what precisely I would find there.

I was at this time a healthy, energetic fellow--well-made but slender in form, restless in manner yet still more so in my thoughts and aspirations. Through my father's generosity, I had conducted early studies with my home tutor and at the Rev. Charles Tuffley's school in Exeter, though it was no one's true expectation that I should pursue a clerical preferment. For I was victim to what my father called an Excess of Animal Spirits, and it was quite apparent to all that life in a Devonshire vicarage would hardly be consonant with my nature. I fancied myself in any case a Deist (much to the Rev. Tuffley's dismay), and would probably have refused a Bishopric at three thousand a year if one had been offered me. Nor, however, was I any more usefully engaged during a year at Trinity College, Cambridge, where the tutors could speak of naught but Plato and like ancients, for which I had but little patience. Why, I would wonder aloud, if there be a Form in Heav'n for every thing we spy on earth, how is there money? Money is for buying what one has not, for filling a perceived lack, so how can there be money in a realm where all is completeness and perfection? To this my Cambridge tutors had no answer but scorn. And so I did not thrive at university, and was soon sent down. I returned to Exeter, where I remained a year before being sent on to my uncle at Wapping. But this last proved all to the best, inasmuch as I had another design--one that rendered my residence in Wapping, so short a distance from the City of London, exceedingly desirable to me. For I, William Tobias Merrick, had every hope of making my living not by the shipping trade, but by what seemed to me the only adventurous profession available to a man of intelligence and enterprize but little fortune--viz., as a Stock-Jobber.

'Twas my old friend, cousin, and occasional home tutor, Joshua Dooling, who had planted this seed in my breast. He it was who gave me the true education of my youth, introducing me to the joyous intricacies of what was then called Dutch finance--that new, uncharted world of notes and shares and annuities, of lotteries, bearer bonds, Refuses, and Puts--which was only then taking hold in and around the Royal Exchange in London. At no small expense to himself, Josh had sent to him at Exeter a commercial periodical, the Collection for the Improvement of Husbandry and Trade, published by a Mr. John Houghton, apothecary and coffee trader of London. Upon its twice-weekly arrival, my cousin and I would leave off our dull studies of figures or Greek to scrutinize this treasure-filled publication, poring especially over the Actions of joint-stock companies and their prices, until the pages wore thin between our fingers. The familiar names of these companies became a kind of incantation with us--Hudson's Bay, Lustring, Blue Paper--and each evening, as we sat in my father's parlour before a dappling fire, we would calculate and recalculate the value of our holdings. "Marry, William!" Josh might say, "The Derby I purchased last week at 55 stands now at 65 and more. I warrant I have outdone every jobber in the City this day!" Of course, these wondrous gains (and our equally wondrous, though more infrequent, losses) were wholly of the imagination, for we two together had not a groat in the world. And yet the excitement of our maneuverings was hardly diminished by this fact. For Josh and I fancied ourselves among the New Men of England, in spirit if not yet in fact. We understood well the most important lesson of the time--namely, that the real wealth of Englishmen would henceforth derive not from the actual doing and making of Things, nor from the owning and exploiting of Lands, but rather from the buying and selling of Prospects and Risks.

Thus my eagerness upon arriving at Wapping, some scant few years after being introduced into these mysteries. What I had heretofore only read and talked about with my tutor was suddenly present before my very eyes. Nor was I alone in my excitement. All of London, it seemed, was in thrall to this new religion of finance. And why should it not be so? A century of strife and hardship--of civil war and plague, of fire and the threat of Popish treachery--was coming to an end. That old devil, King James, had shown his cloven foot and packed off to France, where just another double-dealing Catholic rogue would hardly be noticed. King William was upon the throne, and subject to a great Compromise that would henceforth keep the nation's finances safe from the meddling of overbearing monarchs. Stability and Toleration were the game now, leaving any man free to prosper by his wits--or else to perish by the lack of them. And there was little doubt in my own mind to which fate I was destined.

All of this, however, was still but hearsay to me on that September afternoon when first I arrived on my uncle's doorstep in Wapping. My portmanteau having been deposited (by a rather supercilious young footman) in my garret room at the top of the house, I was immediately conducted across the courtyard to the private offices of the warehouse. Here Mr. Gilbert Hawking, my uncle, sat deeply engaged in a bill of lading. This impressive gentleman--a severe, hatchet-faced figure who wore a chestnut periwig as large as a Dartmoor lamb--rose from behind his massive desk as I entered. "Nephew," said he, "I've not seen you these dozen years. You are quite changed, I see."

"And 'twould be a sorry thing indeed if it were otherwise, Uncle."

"Hrmph," said he, looking somewhat abashed. "I see your point, sir."

Fearing that I had offended him (for giving offense is, I own, a tendency in my behaviour), I quickly added,...

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Verlag
Broadway Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2002
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0767913302
ISBN 13 
9780767913300
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
291
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Verantwortliche Person
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