In Lipstein’s The Vegan (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, July), good-intentioned hedge fund manager Herschel Caine commits a transgression that destabilizes his world.
Both this novel and your first, Last Resort, examine ethically murky situations. What appeals to you about plunging your characters into these moral dilemmas?
My primary goal is to give the reader a moral playground. I don’t want to teach them anything. I want to give them material that they can think through. And to do that, I try to create extremely difficult moral conundrums that don’t have an easy solution and that question each reader’s moral priorities.
What led you to place that “moral playground” in the world of finance?
I’m attracted to characters and situations that I feel society—and especially the publishing industry and the reading world—has a bad view of. When you talk about a book that centers on a hedge fund manager, you initially think, okay, how bad is this guy going to turn out to be? And of course, he does do something bad, but at the core of the novel is his goodness and his belief in his own goodness.
After Herschel behaves irresponsibly at a dinner party, causing injury to a guest, he develops a new awareness of the “hubris of language.” What is the relationship between his guilt and language?
I think it’s in his favor to not believe in language, because only through language can he understand what he did wrong. And throughout, Herschel brushes off certain words like greed. He says the word itself comes with its own morality and so therefore can’t be trusted.
Why does Herschel’s moral crisis also change his relationship with animals, thus causing him to become a vegan?
The first time he has a connection with an animal is when he thinks his neighbor’s dog recognizes his guilt. He sees in this dog this ability to commune in a way where he doesn’t need to explain himself. And then also he wants to pay back his moral debts, and by feeling for animals and recognizing how other humans mistreat animals, he gets the moral high ground and earns back some of his virtue.
The Vegan also has a corporate espionage element that adds suspense while echoing some of the novel’s themes.
Researching the book, I interviewed a bunch of people in quantitative hedge funds to enter their headspace and think about how they morally see what they do and also to understand their fears. At a hedge fund, you’re only as good as your proprietary information. If you’ve discovered something amazing, all that value goes away if somebody else has also discovered it. So there’s an inherent paranoia. And I just love this idea of people stealing information from you, because it shows the other side of language: language is a channel between us and other people, but it’s also a highway that criminals can travel on to get to us.
