New York Diary

The Coffee Trader

So here's a question: How big is the market for the financial-historical fiction-mystery-romance genre of novel? Given David Liss's successes, it's got to be bigger than you'd think.

That said, I find Liss's writing style in this book really annoying. He's done his research, and his plot is quite good, too. But of all the people to define a new popular genre, you'd think the one who succeeded would be able to grip as much with his words as with his tale.

But don't get me wrong: The Coffee Trader is a good book and a fun read. Perhaps the reason why Liss's historical fiction is so successful, even though it does spend an awful lot of time talking about financial markets, is that the economics merely form a backdrop to his characters. Sure, the novel features financial intrigue, loans and usury, plans to corner the coffee market, monopolies, futures, calls and puts and commodities... but these are the stuff of the daily life of its main characters, who are the real focus. You have to include this stuff, and understand it, to understand the lives of the traders in question--but really, The Coffee Trader is a book about personal grudges, human instincts, desperation and misunderstandings.

It is also a book without a hero. The main character (Miguel Lienzo: good at heart, if also cruel and a criminal) is a person with whom we sympathize throughout the book. But by the end, he and we all know that he has acted badly and harmed nearly everybody who has tried to help him (without realizing, of course, that they were honest, or genuine, or helpful, or in danger). He has stolen his brother's wife; financially ruined both his brother and a potential friend; stiffed an honest(-ish) woman, causing her to flee town under pursuit; and contracted to have a true friend beaten to the point of losing an eye; among other things. It is not easy, however, to find these episodes tragic. After all, each of those parties was somehow guilty of one or another dishonesty or cruelty themselves, and we understand how it came to happen that Lienzo, through his own stupidity, stubbornness, righteous sense of revenge, and genuine good intentions, did all he did. Indeed, perhaps the moral of the story is that dishonesty is a recipe for disaster: by each having secrets and shady dealings, the main characters all allowed themselves to be used by another, still shadier character who was truly out to cause destruction (and who succeeded, as seems likely).

Perhaps the big problem with the book is that this is a tragic ending. The machinations of the market--helped, of course, by one truly vengeful individual--have caused the (moral and physical, as well as economic) downfall of many well-intentioned people. One might expect to feel injustice, anger, or simple sadness at such an outcome. Instead, I found that I dismissed the book: "Eh, it's over. That was interesting enough." The plot was completely believable, but there was no sense of the upsetting and seemingly inevitable misfortune of "Death of a Salesman" or Of Mice and Men.

That's unfortunate, because, like those works, The Coffee Trader really is about the downfall of the common man. Lienzo has good intentions (if sometimes questionable means of realizing them): he wants to reach financial solvency, to help his friends, to worship well and to do good in God's eyes. In economic terms, it's true that he succeeds brilliantly--but he has been manipulated, and has done great wrongs by the end of the book. His failings, then, are primarily moral--but these are, to him, of the utmost importance (his criminality notwithstanding). In the final scene, we see him standing alone in his doorframe, crushed, having discovered that he was the bad guy all along. It should be a scene that reminds us of our imperfections, and of how the world can play tricks on us, and of that oft-mentioned road to Hell and the intentions that pave it. It should be a scene that makes us identify with Lienzo's pain, and understand it as concievably our own. (And this is not ridiculous; after all, we have been identifying with Lienzo for the entirety of the book.) It should be a scene that emphasizes a certain amount of terrible futility in trying to live a good life or to do right by those who have helped you, as well as the problems of focusing too intensely on wealth (even if you are living a wretched kind of life).

In fact, it is none of these things. What the final scene is, frankly, is just an aesthetically pleasing word-picture of a man standing in a doorway while his maid cooks a meal behind him.

posted by Skay @ 12:10 PM