Wrong Train, Right Time (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
wrongtrainrighttime) wrote2018-01-14 03:15 pm
wrongtrainrighttime) wrote2018-01-14 03:15 pm
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The Wolf of Wall Street by Jordan Belfort
Belfort, Jordan. The Wolf of Wall Street. Bantam Books, 2007. eBook.
The Wolf of Wall Street is, at it's core, about a man who got mind-bendingly rich through stock fraud and who used those mind-bending riches to behave despicably, trying to describe, in entertaining fashion, why he did what he did and how he came to repent.
The problem is that a) Belfort behaved very despicably, but b) he's not that entertaining.
He keeps aiming for a light and jokey voice but he never hits it. His narration feels affected and awkward. The dialogue he reconstructs suffers as a result, with everyone around him sounding more like sockpuppets than actual people. As such, his descriptions of fraud and vice and reconstructions of how he was back then never actually hit black comedy, or, indeed, comedy at all.
I stopped about a third of the way through and frankly, I feel kind of dirty for even getting that far. There's a kind of vicarious horror in reading about Belfort's exploits, as well as the exploits of his peers, but doing so left me feeling gross by association. Though he himself admits that he used mental gymnastics to justify his deplorable behavior to himself, actually reading said gymnastics in action was a rather disgusting experience. I can't name a specific detail that made me decide that enough was enough; I contemplated stopping many times prior to finally deciding to do so. The only thing that kept me going was morbid curiosity -- and, eventually, the morbid won out over the curious.
The Wolf of Wall Street is, at it's core, about a man who got mind-bendingly rich through stock fraud and who used those mind-bending riches to behave despicably, trying to describe, in entertaining fashion, why he did what he did and how he came to repent.
The problem is that a) Belfort behaved very despicably, but b) he's not that entertaining.
He keeps aiming for a light and jokey voice but he never hits it. His narration feels affected and awkward. The dialogue he reconstructs suffers as a result, with everyone around him sounding more like sockpuppets than actual people. As such, his descriptions of fraud and vice and reconstructions of how he was back then never actually hit black comedy, or, indeed, comedy at all.
I stopped about a third of the way through and frankly, I feel kind of dirty for even getting that far. There's a kind of vicarious horror in reading about Belfort's exploits, as well as the exploits of his peers, but doing so left me feeling gross by association. Though he himself admits that he used mental gymnastics to justify his deplorable behavior to himself, actually reading said gymnastics in action was a rather disgusting experience. I can't name a specific detail that made me decide that enough was enough; I contemplated stopping many times prior to finally deciding to do so. The only thing that kept me going was morbid curiosity -- and, eventually, the morbid won out over the curious.