Popped by a bubble

The greed and giddiness of the times made this seem an achievable goal. In thrall to various market gurus, the zeitgeist and his own frazzled psychological state, he gradually moved more and more of his assets into high-tech stocks. Along the way he met Merrill Lynch stock analyst Henry Blodget, who since has become best known, to put it kindly, for his increasingly hyperbolic recommendations of decreasingly promising high-tech companies. He also got to know Sam Waksal, medical researcher, bon vivant, entrepreneur, friend of Martha Stewart and, now, convicted felon. The portraits of these two, as well as of former SEC Chairman Arthur Levitt Jr., economist Robert Shiller, Corvis Chief Executive David Huber, high-tech pundit George Gilder and others on Wall Street, are sharp and revealing.

The antihero and focus of the book, however, is the author, whose candid self-laceration is sometimes painful to read, especially for those (such as myself and several million others) who have trod similar investment paths. His description of investors' adrenaline-charged, digitally staccato sense of time is harrowing. Those who are or ever have been mesmerized by ubiquitous market tickers, CNBC's business reporters, online brokerages and stock chat rooms will recognize the pervasiveness of Denby's obsession.

Arguably his involvement with the market was an improvement over the lonely, pornography-filled evenings that followed separation from his wife. ("Shifting from one mania to another, from porn to CNBC, and accepting greater risk in the market brought me out of despair.... I buy, therefore I am.") At least the market was out there, somewhat impersonal, and booming. Still, he was troubled. His anxiety about the Nasdaq -- which by March 2000 had reached 5,000 -- and its surreal stock valuations would only allow him to "pull the lids down by taking a Xanax, a beta-blocker, and a swig of the cold-and-flu remedy Nyquil."

The turmoil in his personal life and his increasingly desperate need to remain in his apartment made him all the more vulnerable to the blandishments of Gilder and other high-tech gurus seemingly in touch with the spirit of tomorrow. The "telecosm" and all its glories would take its investors to a new day and a richer life. The promise of broadband and its associated fiber-optic cables, switches, transformers and "last mile" wiring preoccupied him, as did anticipated breakthroughs in genetics, cancer treatment and cell biology generally. A combination of writerly curiosity and financial interest led him to learn a good deal about these fields and to interview some of the players.

With the aforementioned Blodget and Waksal he became friends, and the book details his ambivalent relationships with them. He admired them both -- especially Waksal, the urbane head of ImClone, who embodied "a mixture of idealism, ambition, and guile the likes of which I had never encountered before in a single man." Blodget's youth and earnest responsiveness to his questions also attracted him. Gradually, of course, as the market crashed, so did his assessments of these two.