The Contrarians

A bold and insightful novel detailing a young Wall Street analyst's fall from grace Chris Kelch is at the top of his game, one of Freshler Feld's rising stars. At only twenty-eight, he's one of the highest-rated equity research analysts in his sector; last year, he pulled down nearly half a million dollars. His personal life is also on a roll: his girlfriend, the comely Kersten Henry, couldn't be more supportive. Kelch's small-town, single-parent, Midwestern roots seem far behind. But when a thinly veiled profile of Kelch runs in a prominent magazine, things start to go downhill. Not only does the piece reveal company secrets and cast Freshler Feld in a bad light, it also makes him feel like a dupe: the author tricked him into giving an interview. And it reveals far more about Kelch's conflicted feelings about his past and his job than he has admitted even to himself. Then a stock Kelch handpicked falters, and things go from bad to worse as he is forced to examine just about every assumption, decision, and mistake he's ever made. With suspense and style, Gary Sernovitz's The Contrarians not only creates one of the most memorable "money men" in recent American fiction, it also examines, as no novel has done before, the rise-and the seeds of the fall-of late-nineties Wall Street.