RaveNPR\"It\'s a widely accepted truth that hedge-fund protagonists generally aren\'t interesting. They\'re too rich for their problems to resonate. Their actual job is often nebulous and complicated and therefore boring. They\'re almost impossible to make sympathetic. Or, alternatively, they\'re cartoon villains. But Andrew Lipstein\'s effort in The Vegan is fresh and inventive ... In Lipstein\'s sophomore effort he achieves the difficult feat of realistically animating a hedge fund manager who talks and moves as real hedge fund managers do, or might, but who is compelling and not overly alienating ... Lipstein achieves another feat with his descriptions of financial-world machinations — they\'re lucid and immediate, and the obscene wealth they throw off is refreshingly obscene — appealing, but lurid ... The writing is lilting, grandiose, dense, run-ons full of action and metaphor. It reads like if Martin Amis wrote Money about a more distinguished salesman or, at times, as an F. Scott Fitzgerald-esque commentary on the violence of class. In only a few overwrought moments did it spill past the point of good taste.\
