City Boy II

If “chick-lit” is the genre of fiction featuring young female protagonists obsessed with appearances and shopping, and “mis-lit” is the genre of biography preoccupied with the narrator’s triumph over trauma, then maybe the fad for semi-autobiographical works by young financial professionals describing City careers that have left them with feelings of self-loathing, not to mention huge pads in London, should be referred to as “crunch-lit”.

The City analyst Geraint Anderson got the ball rolling last year with Cityboy: Beer and Loathing in the Square Mile, his bestselling “no-holds-barred, warts-and-all account of life in London’s financial heartland”. Now everyone seems to be at it, with the publication next month of Binge Trading by the former stockbroker-turned-writer Seth Freedman, which claims to be an “account of the visceral, real-life stories that characterise today’s Square Mile” and the publication this week of How I Caused the Credit Crunch by Tetsuya Ishikawa, in which the 30-year-old Oxford graduate and Old Etonian provides “a vivid and personal account of 21st-century banking excess”, based on his six years as a credit banker at ABN AMRO, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley.

Comparing Ishikawa’s account with Anderson’s is a grim business, the literary equivalent of deciding between a scotch egg and a sausage roll in a late-night provincial petrol station. But if you were to identify a defining feature of the emerging genre of crunch-lit, aside from the poor quality of the writing, the speed at which the books are being written (four months for Ishikawa) and the way they fetishise the excesses they are supposedly condemning, it is the question marks that hang over their veracity.

Anderson’s claim that his account is “80 per cent truth” is, at best, debatable and HICTCC seems to suffer from a similar problem. The latter claims to be “a vivid and personal account of banking excess”, but, like Cityboy, is fictionalised and begins with the caveat that “any resemblance to actual firms or persons…is entirely… coincidental”.

Inevitably, on meeting Ishikawa outside Goldman Sachs in the City and walking along Fleet Street in search of somewhere quiet to talk, our conversation revolves around establishing how much of his biography tallies with that of the book’s narrator, Andrew Dover…

Read atTimes Online