A 'labor of chagrin'

As Martha Stewart's big top of a criminal trial begins to stir in Manhattan, David Denby knows that, come showtime, when the Goddess of Home sweeps into court, the country's schadenfreude will kick in again with a roaring vengeance. Remember the glee that followed Stewart's indictment in a stock-trading scandal in June, the jokes about how she might pretty up a prison cell?

Denby, film critic for the New Yorker, knows that the wags are bound to get their jollies as well at his own spectacular misfortune in the stock market -- not that he has been accused of criminal wrongdoing -- along with his ties to Stewart's pal, ImClone Systems Inc. founder Samuel Waksal.

In his memoir, "American Sucker," which is being released Monday, Denby writes about his white-knuckle ride through the world of technology and biotech investment, a place that shimmered with promise and then imploded; from 2000 to 2002, Denby lost nearly $1 million on paper.

And with brutal honesty, Denby, now 60, a father of two, admits that he lost his bearings as well. While managing to write regularly and well for the New Yorker and spend time with his teenage sons, he dabbled in Internet pornography, slept with a married woman and steadied his nerves at night with a cocktail of NyQuil and Xanax, a prescription medication for panic disorder.

Denby, a critic at heart, dissects his own judgment lapses with such abandon that one has to wonder: Is he at all self-conscious about starting his national book tour next week?

"No, I'm not worried," he said in a telephone interview this week, slightly maniacal on a bitterly cold day in New York but good-humored. "If people think there's a good voice in this story, that the writing is engaging and holds your attention, then I'm not worried about what judgments they've come to about what I've revealed."

The release of "American Sucker" by Little, Brown happens to coincide with the start of Stewart's trial and another round of media coverage on the early part of the decade when a stock market bubble fueled irrational exuberance.

Denby, who has taken down a Hollywood mogul or two, acknowledges that he'll be in the line of fire as Stewart's trial gets underway -- she faces charges related to her sale of ImClone stock, just before the biotech company's major reversal of fortune. "I've been a critic for 35 years, and I've published a book before," Denby said. "So you're going to take your knocks, particularly if you lead with your chin. God knows I've panned enough people. It's all part of the game, it comes with the territory."