THE INDEPENDENT (East Hampton, NY)

October 15, 2008
Page B-4

BETWEEN THE COVERS
By Joan Baum

It can’t get any more timely—and sardonic—than Nao Hauser’s comic novel, BRONOFF’S RULES, a fictional insider look at the by-the-minute, hour or day mania called trading.

Sam Bronoff, master mover of invisible money and trader extraordinaire, made millions, but got caught. As the novel opens, he’s just emerged from five years in the federal pen and is doing penance by way of community service—teaching English to a handful of immigrants, an ostensibly harmless enterprise fraught with dialect-studded confusion that is as boring to him as it is to the class.

He’s no longer welcome at his former lavish Westchester home, where his still fabulously wealthy and politically connected wife continues to buy and spend. His ace in the financial hole, he thinks, is the million and a half bucks that he’s secreted on his property. But his estranged wife has moved it and refuses to tell him where. Sam will persevere, but meanwhile attend to his English class, a motley group made up of various ages, ethnicities…and, as it will soon turn out, degrees of greed.

Complications set in when Russian Anna, particularly outspoken about wanting to have the teacher deliver market tips rather than verb declensions, shrewdly pressures Sam to recommend a stock by way of bringing to class one day a young and beautiful magazine editor. Sam is expected to show his gratitude. He succumbs to the girl and to Anna’s demands, massaging his ethics, but not without repeatedly warning Anna when to sell.

Coincidentally, he’s working on a book proposal about how to trade like a Wall Street insider, especially what not to do, a set of rules, the most significant of which will emerge as Rule #14: “Luck is not a rule. But it is the exception that keeps us all playing.” Hauser, a general-interest writer for several well known, high-end magazines, crafts here a first novel that resonates with authenticity. It’s a serious spoof, if an oxymoron may be permitted, an entertaining if diffusing tale with solid, sobering advice.

Hauser not only would appear to know the market but how to market her own book. Along with the novel comes a money game: “The Missing Rule Contest" (www.bronoff.com): Add a rule to Bronoff’s and win $1200. Deadline, June 30, 2009. Hauser, sole judge. The rule must be consistent with the context and style of Bronoff’s other rules and relevant to circumstances in the plot.

The pitch (though not the prize) is worthy of Bronoff himself, a likable, somewhat gullible guy in the ways of love and family but a sharp player in the ways of Wall Street. He knows he shouldn’t be advising his students but, well, Anna blabbed, and they’re all small time and eager to make it in America, and the girlfriend thinks what he’s doing is wonderful. Of course, the students will not heed Bronoff’s rules or him.

Hauser cleverly manages to exact sympathy for Bronoff, but that may be because all the others here seem stock (no pun intended) stereotypes. They include Sam’s bright, bitchy wife, her fey conniving gay decorator, a high-priced installation artist who takes Sam’s clothes and makes them into a gallery show, slimy, power-hungry investors and psychologists who will bury the hatchet anywhere if the price is right, even Sam’s feckless daughter and his own ambitious girlfriend—all are wily, self centered, materialistic and hypocritical, and never more so than when pretending To Care—about poverty, the environment, the unfortunates of the world.

Though over-the-top, especially in the book’s mayhem-packed, charity-party climax, BRONOFF’S RULES at the end allows the cool, calm and collected Bronoff to re-enter the world of trading, newly ensconced in a Park Avenue high-rise office and “totally absorbed” by the “urgency” of his passion for “moving money.”

The book straddles two genres: comedy and domestic drama. The first is given over to making fun of big-time hustlers, the second to Bronoff’s need for love and affection. The mix of the two creates an odd ambivalence. We like Sam, but his eagerness to re-engage in trading casts him finally as cynical, even as we root for his success. Still, given the current economic crisis BRONOFF’S RULES may just be the most prescient novel around.

Check out sambronoff.wordpress.com.

BRONOFF’S RULES by Nao Hauser. OMR [Old Man River] Press (www.Bronoff.com) 336 pp.