The Novel Experiment

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They more than supplemented the information I devoured from newspapers, magazines, and blogs.

One of the first stories to set my adrenaline going was about a female trader, a rising star and not even 30 years old. I decided that my protagonist would have a job like hers. But the character, India Palmer, would be a 38-year-old mother of two (an old lady in Wall Street terms, I soon learned). "You can't do that," my neighbor, the former trader, said. "It won't be believable. You should put her in sales. That would be believable." It is true that it would have been more likely for someone like India to work in sales. Still, I ignored that advice—the impossible was the point. I wanted to transform an unlikely prospect into a star, Pygmalion-like.

Of all the stories I come across in my research, those about the behavior of traders interested me most. Their military psychologies, the Lombardi-esque metaphors, and the Byzantine hierarchy. Why were some allowed to ride home in a company town car while the others had to take a taxi? They bet on everything and constantly held impromptu competitions amongst themselves, such as who could identify six different brands of bottled water by taste. All believed in bad omens. A watch worn the day a trader got rinsed wouldn't be allowed back on the floor. In the middle of the night, they woke up to check their positions as markets opened across the globe.

From 2005 to 2009, traders answered my questions and unwittingly offered me a front-row seat at the epic mortgage-backed-securities mess that catapulted us into the worst recession since the Great Depression. The most interesting thing to me, once I got beyond the staggering sums of money in play, was how a confluence of events involving the government, bankers, ordinary people, and big dreams had come together to create the imbroglio. I watched the story unfold with all its riveting plot turns and complex characters as traders rode the roller coaster across 2007 and into 2008, and as firms blew up and the economy crashed.

What had been a source of artistic curiosity for me was now writ large all across the world. It was astonishing, as a novelist, to be working on a subject in real time. I was an accidental tourist to what had seemed like another planet with an entirely different species, but by the end it had quite directly collided with the world we live in.

As the collapse unfolded, my writing froze. I had not intended to write a novel about Wall Street blowing up. Frankly, I couldn't keep up with the news or the implications. For four months, I didn't write. The final chapter languished in my computer. Then it dawned on me: The novel can end as I had always intended it to end. What happened on Wall Street has happened before; it will happen again. My story isn't an attempt to make tidy sense of the global financial system. That, of course, is not the novelist's job.

As a fly on the wall, paying a little more attention than others outside of Wall Street, I saw we were all to some degree responsible for the mess. A blind eye was turned. Having more—a bigger house, more deals, greater profits—had become an American right, a belief. I've come to understand how staggeringly much we know about the world of finance, manipulating numbers, creating products—derivatives, CDOs, and so forth—yet how little we know. As with medicine and deep-water oil exploration, we know so much and not enough. In between the extremes is our own hubris, to which, it seems, we will always be vulnerable. Locating that hubris, however, is a novelist's job.

Dear Money by Martha McPhee will be published next week.

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