Andrew Lipstein communicate animals at the Prospect Park Zoo.
Photo: Hugo Yu/
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Andrew Lipstein and I satisfy at the Prospect Park Zoo on a Monday simply after a bank of wildfire smoke has actually cleared the city. The sky is a dim gray, and the air is thick with humidity. Both individuals and the animals appear tired. A sea lion swims a sluggish loop undersea as a zoo attendant pipes down its swimming pool. The peacocks are shouting. The Hamadryas baboons, whose deals with appear like they’ve been pinched at the nose, sprawl on a rocky outcrop. Looking at them through the glass, Lipstein says, “These guys always seem so deranged and sad. They don’t even know they’re crazy.”
It’s in the spirit of Lipstein’s 2nd book, The Vegan, to attest to the obvious distress of the animals who bump up versus the human world. The book follows a New York financing man called Herschel Caine who feels an unexpected, almost psychedelic kinship with animals — his next-door neighbor’s beagle, for example, however likewise a housefly and a pigeon that has what he chooses is “the fleeting, easy beauty of youth.” Herschel’s unexpected interest in nonhuman inner lives follows a freak mishap including a dosage of ZzzQuil he slips into a mixed drink for a bothersome supper visitor who, he later on discovers, falls on her method home and participates in a coma. Shaken, Herschel informs nobody what he did, rather trying to best his ethical balance sheet through a series of progressively outrageous formulas, consisting of ending up being a vegan. At one point, to please his animal fixation, he burglarizes the Prospect Park Zoo to communicate the prisoners. All this while running a quantitative hedge fund that might be guilty of a much more comprehensive form of misbehavior.
The unique sets a series of dead-serious ethical traps for its lead character to journey into however is likewise uproarious, and Lipstein’s composing voice is smooth and constrained. On his method to what might be knowledge, Herschel bluffs through teletherapy, sends out irritable business-speak e-mails to financiers, and lugs around a tank consisting of 2 valued anoles he got at a family pet store. “A lot of books about money take for granted the evilness of it,” Lipstein says. “I love starting with the hedge-fund guy and examining his goodness. We take it for granted that we’re supposed to hate him.” When I mention that Herschel does bad things in the unique, he asks what I indicate, appearing protective on his character’s behalf.
Lipstein can discuss financing by doing this in part due to the fact that he works nearby to the market himself — he has what he calls a “mathematical” job for Robinhood, the financial-services business understood for its super-accessible stock-trading app, making tools for choices financiers. He appears for our interview in sunglasses and a Barron’s cap; his other half, Mette Lützhøft, makes podcasts for that publication. He explains himself as “not a hard-core capitalist, but I believe in a world of good capitalism. Extremely high taxes.”
A couple of months prior to beginning to compose The Vegan, he began trading stocks and says he ended up being amazed with “how much psychology is in the markets.” The novelistic capacity was apparent, as was that for earnings. “Not to lack all humility, but I ended up making a lot of money,” he says — the specific quantity of his very first book advance, in truth. That book was his very first novel, Last Resort, a relentlessly clever publishing-world saga about a writer who lifts a salacious story wholesale from an old friend’s life and eventually faces the consequences. He submitted the book to FSG under a pseudonym, betting that editors would be more likely to think he was a big author veiling his identity and take a chance than if he used his real name. It worked. (His U.K. editor thought he might have been the disgraced author Dan Mallory angling for a comeback.) It didn’t shoot onto best-seller lists when it came out last year, but critics loved it — The Guardian called it a work of “near genius.”
Unlike his characters, who tend to be fretful and manipulative, the 35-year-old author, freckled and wide-eyed, is at ease in conversation and quick to banter. When talking to Lipstein, you may start to think the equation is simple: Put in the effort and novels will come out. He thinks of writing in the same category as running, an activity he took up while trying to lose weight as a teenager, which helped him prove to himself that he could “do something very difficult.” He runs the number of miles he wants to run; he writes the number of pages he wants to write. “If I set a word quota for myself, there is nothing that will prevent me from doing it,” he says. “I become psycho with quotas.” The goal is “changing your life by brute force.”
Lipstein didn’t grow up reading. He believes his OCD gave him a lingering feeling that he had missed a word, and as a result, he would go over the same sentence again and again; he struggled to finish books. His undergraduate degree, from Haverford, is in math. He also had a sense of humor and enjoyed the attention it gave him. Eventually, he started writing for, then running, the college satire magazine, and after a senior-year creative-writing class, he quietly finished a novel. “I would listen to him and some of our friends who were math majors talk,” says his classmate Joshua Mikutis, now a rabbi. “It was totally esoteric — math problems that were like ‘If you have a sphere and you want to turn it into a doughnut, how does that happen?’” Lipstein’s writing “seemed like it was out of nowhere,” Mikutis adds. “How many people are hypothetical novelists?”
That initially manuscript led to another, then another and another and another. Lipstein insists his first five unpublished novels are “shockingly embarrassing. I don’t think I could read anything I wrote then without losing all of my dignity.” (Publishers weren’t interested either, though parts of his fourth found their way into Last Resort’s book within a book.) Before publishing a unique, he kept up a steady stream of creative projects: a microfiction website named Thickjam, a parody New Yorker called The Neu Jorker he made with the writer James Folta, and an e-book and e-magazine store called 0s&1s that runs author interviews under such categories as “Thick Skin” (in which writers close read their negative reviews) and “The Art of Commerce” (which focuses on the business of making books). He keeps up with new fiction — he’s effusive about Assembly, by Natasha Brown, and Y/N, by Esther Yi — however also loves the academic William Ian Miller’s books about disgust and humiliation; the 1980s Wall Street takeover classic Barbarians at the Gate, by Bryan Burrough and John Helyar; “books about Enron”; and all the finance news he can handle. “I consume a ton of financial media, and I love how real it is,” he says. When you have a number in a headline, he thinks, “it has to be true. A financial headline will be like, ‘This fund made $2.3 trillion last year.’” In cultural media, there might be a payout, but “no one says it.”
Lipstein’s books are rich with numbers and status symbols — the protagonists in Last Resort and The Vegan both experience unexpected influxes of cash and know how much things like Tabriz rugs cost (“$12,000, another $1,000 to ship it back”). In The Vegan, Herschel and his wife try to cultivate a friendship with their cultured Cobble Hill neighbors by serving “escarole with pancetta and hen of the woods, sweet potato and sage ravioli in parmesan broth (the idea shamelessly cribbed from Frankies, an Italian restaurant up the street), and bone-in pork chop saltimbocca (ditto).” The people Lipstein writes about may be interested in trying to do good, but they’re also vain, status-obsessed, and darkly exacting in their assessments of one another’s furniture. Even good acts get tallied up and compared. While composing The Vegan, “I thought a lot about how money and morality are similar,” he says. “Only you know how much money you have; only you know how much morality you have.”
Herschel is the kind of character who’s normally in strict control of his emotional landscape, and his sudden influx of animal empathy strikes him like a bout of nausea. If he could only look an animal in the eye and somehow communicate with it, he supposes, he could gain some understanding of what is happening to him. Lipstein is a vegetarian, and, like Herschel, he stopped eating meat out of a buried sense of grief: Six years ago, his father choked on a piece of steak that cut off his oxygen flow; as a result, he became blind and paralyzed. Lipstein wasn’t at the dinner but says he couldn’t help but feel responsible for what had happened, as though some minor decision he made in his life had led to that moment.
Two years later, while sharing pork dumplings at East Wind Snack Shop with Lützhøft, Lipstein suddenly looked at his plate and told her, “I can’t do this ever again.” The connection wasn’t immediately clear; he realized only later why it felt so viscerally wrong to eat the food on the table. He believes now that there was a subtle connection between his repulsion and the irrational guilt he felt. “My dad chokes on steak, and two years later I become a vegetarian,” he says, beginning to tear up. “It didn’t occur to me that it had anything to do with it, and yet I sensed that the reason why was totally out of my grip.” Lipstein later started writing The Vegan, inspired in part by the unnervingly abrupt, emotionally freighted sense of disgust he had experienced.
Back in Prospect Park with rain threatening, he and I enter the so-called Discovery Trail and make it to the Styan’s red panda, the small zoo’s prized possession. Straddling a tree branch, its tongue lolling, the panda looks “dazed out,” Lipstein says, as though it’s in the middle of an 18-hour workday. (The panda’s brother doesn’t even show up for his shift.) In The Vegan, Herschel is desperate to make contact with this very same animal, standing in front of its enclosure and taking off all his clothes. The late-night encounter doesn’t lead to the communication he craves. “There I stood in front of him as he’d never seen a human before,” Herschel thinks proudly — however the red panda is startled and runs away. We leave our clothing on, the red panda stays, and a kid runs over to make what he appears to think is a panda noise. “Make a noise back,” Lipstein says to the animal. “Come on!”
