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Big, Bad WolfeTom Wolfe's astonishingly lame hedge-fund article.

By Daniel Gross
Posted Monday, April 30, 2007, at 6:14 PM ET

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In the video accompanying the piece, Wolfe reminds us that he's been a champion of "highly realistic fiction." Is that what he's after here? I'm sure there are some hedge-fund managers and private-equity magnates who look, dress, and behave like the ones Wolfe describes. But he's painting with an incredibly broad brush, and much of it simply doesn't ring true. For every grasping, snarling, self-promoting hedge-fund manager, there's an anonymous guy just trying to make a living, or a public-minded financier: a George Soros, or a Joel Greenblatt, who is trying to remake a school in Queens. Steve Schwartzmann of the Blackstone Group deserves all the ridicule Wolfe would heap on him for throwing himself a $3 million 60th birthday party. But on his 60th birthday, quantitative genius James Simons of Renaissance Capital (2006 compensation: $1.7 billion) "hosted a geometry symposium that featured chats on such topics as the Chern-Simons Invariants," according to the Financial Times.

Then there's the Jewish Question. "Many prominent hedge fund managers are Jewish," Wolfe writes, "and on Round Hill Road and Pecksland Road in Greenwich, as well as on Park and Fifth in Manhattan, there has arisen, like a breeze after dark, the sibilant sound of people with social cachet whispering to one another, behind the hand, variations on the theme, 'Some of my best friends are Jewish, but.' " A little later, Wolfe catches himself. "Mercifully, such statistical breakdowns don't exist, but it would appear that no extraordinary fraction of hedge fund managers are Jewish." Mercifully? Give me a break. And when Wolfe does name names in this piece, it sounds like an old Jewish law firm: Cohen, Loeb, Icahn, Lampert, Feinberg & Kovner. The obnoxious guy in the lede reminds us of Meyer Wolfsheim from The Great Gatsby.

Here's the big difference between these masters of the universe and the ones he wrote about in the 1980s and 1990s: Wolfe doesn't seem to have any empathy for them (as he did for Sherman McCoy) or any awe or admiration for them (as he did for Charlie Croker). He seems to have only resentment. Wolfe notes with glee that posh clubs and elite museums still won't admit the arrivistes into their midst. He harps on the status anxiety that impels them to behave in such a ghastly fashion. These highly paid people are inordinately fixated on status symbols, on their place in the pecking order. They're horrid because they want to be recognized not just for professional accomplishments but for their taste and style. Or so says the dandy who tools around the Upper East Side in his white 2003 Cadillac, which, the magazine informs us, "even has white faux-suede floor mats with clear vinyl covers to keep them clean." Says Wolfe: "It's the most important thing in my life right now."

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Daniel Gross is the Moneybox columnist for Slate and the business columnist for Newsweek. You can e-mail him at . He is the author of Pop! Why Bubbles Are Great for the Economy.
Photograph of Tom Wolfe by Frank Micelotta/Getty Images.
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