Save this article to read it later.
Find this story in your accountsSaved for Latersection.
The sky is a dim gray, and the air is thick with humidity.
Both the people and the animals seem exhausted.
A sea lion swims a slow loop underwater as a zoo attendant hoses down its pool.
The peacocks are screaming.
Looking at them through the glass, Lipstein says, These guys always seem so deranged and sad.
They dont even know theyre crazy.
All this while running a quantitative hedge fund that may be guilty of a much broader form of misconduct.
I love starting with the hedge-fund guy and examining his goodness.
We take it for granted that were supposed to hate him.
He describes himself as not a hard-core capitalist, but I believe in a world of good capitalism.
The novelistic potential was obvious, as was that for profit.
(His U.K. editor thought he might have been thedisgraced author Dan Malloryangling for a comeback.)
I become psycho with quotas.
The goal is changing your life by brute force.
Lipstein didnt grow up reading.
His undergraduate degree, from Haverford, is in math.
He also had a sense of humor and enjoyed the attention it gave him.
Lipsteins writing seemed like it was out of nowhere, Mikutis adds.
How many people are hypothetical novelists?
That first manuscript led to another, then another and another and another.
Lipstein insists his first five unpublished novels are shockingly embarrassing.
I dont think I could read anything I wrote then without losing all of my dignity.
I consume a ton of financial media, and I love how real it is, he says.
When you have a number in a headline, he thinks, it has to be true.
A financial headline will be like, This fund made $2.3 trillion last year.
In cultural media, there may be a payout, but no one says it.
Even good acts get tallied up and compared.
While writingThe Vegan, I thought a lot about how money and morality are similar, he says.
Only you know how much money you have; only you know how much morality you have.
He believes now that there was a subtle connection between his repulsion and the irrational guilt he felt.
(The pandas brotherdoesnt even show up for his shift.
Make a noise back, Lipstein says to the animal.
