The Mezrich house style is light on formal quotation: He employs omniscient third-person narratives, rotating chapter by chapter through a stable of characters ... Plotkin and Gill are pretty much the only two characters in this book who verifiably walk the earth. The other major voices appear to be either anonymized or composite characters, stand-ins for the WallStreetBets rabble, motivated alternately by vengeance, fun, desperation, boredom. All these characters can be ventriloquized whenever Mezrich needs to explain a concept in finance; they experience convenient revelations whenever the plot needs advancing ... It’s hard to tell what we are supposed to make of any of the facts we 'learn' about him or any other figure in the saga, whether we can take them at face value or are better off soaking up the general ambience ... Where a Michael Lewis post-mortem might reflect months of close access and a love of granularity, and a Matt Levine newsletter might be sly and attuned to every absurdity, Mezrich’s piece of financial journalism aims at something different: It could not possibly be made any easier to read. These are 289 frictionless pages, rife with cinematic establishing shots and verbal summaries of memes. Sometimes, in fact, Mezrich’s estimation of his readers hurts my feelings...You get the sense that Mezrich has alarms going off anytime he wades too far into fact. I want to reach out and assure him that I can handle 10 sentences in a row without the word 'goddamn,' that the facts are OK, and indeed enliven this book whenever they do shyly appear ... Don’t sweat the details. You’re gonna love the movie.
... is built on scenes that the author has re-created; quotation marks, in the main, are conveniently absent ... Mr. Mezrich opines that GameStop represents the culmination of a populist movement and that, in the future, the stock market might lose all connection to the fundamentals, like 'an untethered balloon.' But the thing with a short squeeze is that, once the shorts capitulate (as they did in GameStop), there are few folks left to buy. GameStop’s stock remains many multiples above its pre-mania level, but it has fallen from its peak by more than half. The fundamentals are not dead yet.
Mezrich brings his characteristic cinematic flair to this breathless account ... A number of characters come to life ... It’s this angle, of new investors willing to lose their investments so long as they brought down the wealthy and powerful with them, that formulates the most page-turning part of the tale. Mezrich’s is a lively, thrilling, and comprehensive account.
... prose that harkens to the new journalism of old ... Mezrich’s story is a tangle, necessarily, since the author has to sort out many threads ... In the hands of Michael Lewis, the narrative might have been neater, and Mezrich lets a few key terms go by without adequate explication—for example, readers new to the notion of order flow trading may get lost. The takeaway, though, is that life is short and Wall Street complicated. In that world, the winners are few and the losers, legion ... A touch long and wobbly but just the thing for alt-finance geeks with background in trading language and practice.
