The Counting House (2023)
"Beautiful, very funny and oddly inspiring. A true and hilarious account of what it is like at the coal face of modern high finance, and also a lovely portrait of what it is like to care very much about doing something very hard.”
— Matt Levine, columnist, Bloomberg Opinion
“Blisteringly funny, intimidatingly smart, and also, somehow, deeply humane.”
– Louisa Hall, author of Reproduction
“Not since Liar’s Poker has the lowdown on high finance—its hustlers and hucksters, its VCs and B.S.D.s—been delivered with such insider’s knowledge or such human comedy.”
— Garth Risk Hallberg, author of City on Fire
“Because we had a very bad year.” Thus begins the existential crisis of the Chief Investment Officer of a prestigious college endowment whose failure to hit his performance targets leads him to profound questions about life, his job, his marriage, parenthood, and the philosophy of investing—and reveals more about the hubris, delusion, brilliance, hope, and disappointment on Wall Street than any novel in years.
With its wry appreciation for the absurd, The Counting House may be the funniest novel ever written about American business. Sernovitz’s story is rooted in an insider’s knowledge—and the insider’s language—of real people and real firms.
Known throughout simply as “the CIO”, Sernovitz’s protagonist sits at the center of modern finance: hundreds of hedge funds, venture capitalists, stock pickers, bond traders, and private equity managers visit him every year, asking for money. He helms the engine room of the modern academy: the six-billion-dollar endowment he presides over allows the school to compete for students, faculty, prestige, moral purpose―and solvency. The CIO is a winner in bourgeois America's highest dream: "doing well by doing good."
And then all that he thinks he understands―about investing, about his own talents, about every choice and non-choice that brought his life to where it is―begins to fall apart. At first, slowly, amid endless fascinating conversations with his staff, his wildly talented (and sometimes hilarious) trustees, and the motley money managers that march through his office. And then quickly, in an epic showdown with a reclusive, legendary hedge fund manager, his university’s richest and most stingy billionaire alumnus.
Readers of this fast-paced novel, told mainly in dialogue, share in the thrill of a unique voice that blends high and low, literary and street-smart, numbers and people to tell a highly original story of the inner life of a professional investor: a story that reveals how the workings of modern life rest upon the market's unforgiving truths. Fans of Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities and Michael Lewis’ The Big Short will revel in Sernovitz’s take on chasing alpha from the ivory tower.
The Green and the Black (2016)
"Gary Sernovitz is a unique figure in American letters. A talented novelist (his The Contrarians should be read alongside Liar's Poker as an introduction to the world of the American investment bank), he is also a private equity investor, specializing in the oil sector. He is, finally, a person of conscience. His account here of the shale revolution of the past decade is funny, informed, and unsparing. You may not share his affection for natural gas, or accept his case for fracking, but if you are opposed to these technologies - and you should be - it's important to understand the other side."
— Keith Gessen
“It is refreshing to have such contentious issues sieved through Mr. Sernovitz’s inquisitive mind, balancing the most pessimistic and optimistic visions of change... This book is ultimately a call for us to trust our native spirit of enterprise: The very ingenuity that led to America’s shale boom will allow us to meet the challenges that it has thrown up.”
— Philip Delves Broughton, The Wall Street Journal
“The Green and the Black is well balanced, reporting accurately and entertainingly on the attitudes and beliefs of oilmen and environmentalists about fracking and the oil industry in general. Strikingly, however, Sernovitz believes that the oil and gas business has changed fundamentally over the past two decades, and mostly in ways that benefit the fight against climate change. The reason, he argues, is fracking.”
— Tim Flannery, The New York Review of Books
"Gary Sernovitz has written a mini-masterpiece about an American-born technology that has the continuing potential to revolutionize the world of energy economics and bring about social and political challenges and opportunities for many decades. His style is intelligent, balanced with regard to highlighting competing views of each major topic, and technically and economically illuminating. Everyone in America should read Chapter 11. If you don't necessarily agree with every claim the author makes, you will nonetheless find the book incredibly informative, well-researched, and witty."
— Jim Hackett, Former Chairman and CEO, Anadarko Petroleum
The Green and the Black bridges the gap in America's energy education. With an insider's firsthand knowledge and unprecedented clarity, Sernovitz introduces readers to the shales—a history-upturning "Internet of oil"—tells the stories of the shale revolution's essential characters, and addresses all the central controversies. To capture the economic, political, and environmental prizes, we need to adopt a balanced, informed perspective. We need to take the green with the black. Where we go from there is up to us.
The Contrarians (2002)
"The Contrarians [is] a novel of ideas in a tradition not much observed in our own literature...Extremely clever."
— Richard Eder, The New York Times
A bold, funny, and insightful novel about a young Wall Street analyst's fall from grace.
Chris Kelch is at the top of his game, one of Freshler Feld's rising stars. At only 28, he's the #5 rated equity research analyst in his sector. He made nearly half a million dollars last year. And his personal life is on a roll: his girlfriend, the pampered Kersten Henry, couldn't be more supportive. Kelch's single-parent, lower-middle-class, Midwestern roots seem far behind. But when a thinly veiled profile of Kelch runs in a prominent magazine, his life begins to unravel. The article reveals "the truth" about Kelch’s character, equity research, and Freshler Feld. It raises accusations of intellectual sloppiness—and corruption. And it makes Kelch feel like a dupe: its author promised him that their interview would remain confidential.
Then Kelch’s marquee stock falters, and things go from bad to worse. His closest friends, his arrogant assistant, his no-nonsense mentor, the department’s celebrity managing director, and maybe even Freshler Feld’s CEO himself have questions they want answered. As the moment of reckoning—or escape—approaches, Kelch is forced to examine just about every assumption and decision he has ever made in his life.
With suspense and style, The Contrarians not only creates one of the most memorable "ordinary guys" in recent American fiction, it also examines, as no novel has done before, the culture and character - the rise and the seeds of the fall - of late nineties Wall Street. Writing with the same wit and exhilarating prose he brought to his critically acclaimed first novel, Great American Plain, Gary Sernovitz has created both a razor-sharp portrait of Wall Street and a uniquely original novel about what it means to work, live, cope, and succeed in contemporary America.
Great American Plain (2001)
"[A] rock-solid first novel...Sernovitz's debut is a trenchant, often touching meditation upon isolation, despair and thwarted ambition."
— Publishers Weekly
Edward Steinke, with all the ambition and steadfastness of his 24 years, believes in only one thing: Perfect Execution. This is the sales technique from the 1954 masterpiece Classic Sales: Theory and Technique, Ed's secular New Testament. Unfortunately for Ed, he is selling the Brackett 180-X piano organ at the South Exhibition Hall of a large Midwestern state fair, and Perfect Execution is proving perfectly useless. Barry Steinke, Ed's sullen, cocky younger brother and employee, is less than supportive: having already surrendered his adolescent dreams of becoming a rockabilly superstar with his group, The Hotels, he cannot understand Ed's commitment to professional success. Through the eyes of their parents, customers, and ex-girlfriends, we come to see that, in Ed and Barry's running struggle, what is at stake is nothing less than their conception of themselves and the world.
Between the brothers comes Leila Genet, imaginative but timid, frozen by life, who wanders the hall looking to escape into "the stupid happiness of the Fair." Barry falls in love with her. Ed falls into doubt, debt, and-perhaps-in love with Leila too. And then comes the surprisingly difficult matter of convincing Leila that neither of them are, in fact, as maladjusted as they seem.
Great American Plain is a cross between John Updike's The Poorhouse Fair and Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine-and, with its large cast, deeply humane vision, and three unforgettable characters, it establishes Gary Sernovitz not only as a uniquely gifted writer but one of the funniest voices to appear in years.