When we meet Carrie Sun, she can't shake the feeling that she's wasting her life. The daughter of Chinese immigrants, Carrie excelled in school, graduated early from MIT, and climbed up the corporate ladder, all in pursuit of the American dream. But at twenty-nine, she's left her analyst job, dropped out of an MBA program, and is trapped in an unhappy engagement. So when she gets the rare opportunity to work at one of the most prestigious hedge funds in the world, she knows she can't say no. Carrie is the sole assistant to the firm's billionaire founder. Playing the game at the highest levels, amid the ultimate winners in our winner-take-all economy, Carrie soon finds her identity swallowed whole by work. With her physical and mental health deteriorating, she begins to rethink what it actually means to waste one's life.
Emphatically not polemical. In its 352 pages, inequality comes up about a quarter of the way through and passingly thereafter. Marx gets a nod in the final chapter. Its primer on investment banking is lucid, but what Sun knows best are the caprices of the overclass ... The same qualities that nearly reduced her to an automaton have made her an astute, punctilious narrator. Her billionaire boss, hugging her goodbye, gets off easy—but they always do. Apparently he’s almost never interviewed or photographed. A coup, then, that in these pages he’s fully, suboptimally human.
It takes some mental gymnastics to buy that Sun, an otherwise smart and competent individual, could be so guileless that she earnestly believed at one point that working at Fidelity would allow her to find fulfillment ... She deftly weaves together multiple threads...that suggest a psychology of sorts, a blurry portrait of the kind of person who could willingly damage herself for such a job. But the individual paint strokes, although exquisitely and vividly rendered, never quite come together to form a convincing whole.
White-collar workplaces are not inherently high-drama. As an employee, this is ideal. For a nonfiction writer, it’s a challenge ... The office memoir can sometimes be a Künstlerroman of sorts—a portrait of the artist coming into her craft. But, just as often, it is the story of a writer trying to have a job that isn’t writing, and trying to be normal about it. The literary identity is all over these books ... Office memoirs gesture at a larger American story about what it takes to have a financially stable creative life in the twenty-first century, without compromising one’s class position. Holding down a white-collar job is far from the only way to sustain an art practice, but the structure of a creative life supported by a corporate salary attracts a certain type of person ... Just as Sun’s self-abnegation becomes unsustainable, her writing breaks loose. The maneuver is unusually stylish for a memoir. It would work beautifully in a novel.
