E-Mail This Article to a Friend Exchange student In his reviews for the New Yorker, David Denby comes across as a bit of a know-it-all. But as his new book American Sucker makes clear, he has a thing or two to learn about the stock market. BY CHRIS WRIGHT

The first thing you notice walking into David Denby’s apartment is the faint aroma of cat. Sure enough, within seconds the kitty appears, nuzzling ankles and meowing with as much coquetry as it can muster, leaving a trail of ginger hairs in its wake. The apartment in which Denby and his cat reside is located on New York’s Upper West Side. It is a cramped and somewhat dim place, filled with mismatched furniture, magazines, stuff. In the living room there hangs a large poster, in French, advertising the film Mommie Dearest. In the bathroom, a twice-folded New York Times rests on the floor beside the toilet bowl. It’s the kind of pad a reluctant bachelor might call home.

As a film critic for the New Yorker, Denby occupies a rarefied position in the media world. You half expect him to come to the door wearing a smoking jacket. But no. He’s dressed in what might be called Household Rumple. "Come in," he says, ignoring the cat. "Come in." Denby, who is 60, looks like a storybook mole — his face a frizz of gray fur, his eyes diminished by thick-lensed glasses. "Do you want some tea?" he asks, then sets about removing two tatty rugs from beneath a pair of large speakers that are situated, oddly, in the center of the living room. "Cuts down on the vibration," Denby explains, tugging at a rug. "Improves the sound." When it is suggested that the rugs may also serve to keep the downstairs neighbors happy, he responds, "Ah, to hell with the downstairs neighbors."

Okay, so you wouldn’t necessarily want to live below David Denby. You get the sense that he’s fine with that. Far more difficult for Denby to swallow, however, was the news, delivered in the spring of 1999, that his wife of 18 years, novelist Cathleen Schine, no longer wanted to live with him. This revelation, as documented in his recently published memoir, American Sucker (Little, Brown), threw Denby for a loop. "The whole thing started," he says, his elbows resting on a small, rather forlorn-looking dining-room table, "after Cathy announced that she wanted to leave and go in search of a new reality."

I love you,’ she said. ‘But I can’t live with you anymore.’"

These words, uttered within the first few pages of American Sucker, set the stage for an ego-mangling, savings-annihilating meltdown on Denby’s part — "A maniacal episode," he calls it now. The rest of the book chronicles the lovelorn critic’s disastrous foray into the stock market, an elaborate act of dissociation that cost Denby — and his wife and two boys — somewhere in the region of $900,000. "It was a very difficult book to write," he says, sounding like he means it. "Because I’m, you know, I’m a proud man, so to admit that you’re stupid, and on that scale." He pauses. "Then there was the question of how much personal information to reveal." Quite.

As anyone who’s read his New Yorker reviews will know, Denby is a meticulous, cerebral critic, the alter ego to the magazine’s other film writer, Anthony Lane, who goes for laughs in his reviews the way a cat goes for a piece of dangled string. While Lane performs his midair loops and twirls, Denby looks on from the windowsill, a solemn, often disapproving observer. "The cutting rate in some of these spectacle movies drives me nuts," he says during one of his many asides. "Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes is cut so rapidly it made it impossible not only to feel anything, it also made it impossible to see anything."

In his memoir, Denby describes himself as "one of God’s soberer creatures." There is indeed something a bit tweedy about Denby, something of the frustrated don, an impression borne out by his previous book, the many-paged Great Thoughts, in which he reviewed and defended the Western canon. What a surprise, then, what an opportunity for gleeful head-shaking, to read this: "I entered in that long summer of 1999 a dark and empty tunnel, an enclosure illuminated along the walls by a flash of naked men and women. I had discovered porn on the Internet." The venerable David Denby, sweating in the "solitude of night," pleasuring himself in the blue-gray glow of a computer screen. Isn’t that something.

Before long, though, Denby was lured away from the delights of Asian Asses and Scandinavian Sluts by the siren song of money. In 2000, he hit upon a scheme to score a cool $1 million, and thereby buy out his wife’s interest in the Manhattan apartment they had shared, by investing in tech stocks. "All New York stories are real-estate stories in the end," he says. "I realized as I kept resisting the notion of selling that there was some psychological block here, some symbolic value, as if by leaving the apartment I would die in some way, because that’s where we had been happy and raised children. So the initial impulse was to hold on to the apartment by hooking into the boom when it still seemed possible to make money quickly."

As Denby himself might put it, O folly!

American Sucker is a book whose outcome is known before we’ve turned page one. The market flops. The investor loses his shirt — or the equivalent of 50,000 shirts. Boo hoo. What keeps the reader going, besides schadenfreude, is Denby’s ability to go beyond his own experience, to tell the larger story of the market’s rise and fall. In Denby’s hands, the stock-market crash is more than a story about economics, it’s a story about human frailty, love, death, envy, loyalty, greed, sex, and, of course, what it means to be an American. Occasionally, the author’s digressions tend toward sanctimony — "Making fun of the ’60s," he writes, "was no more than a rancorous mistake" — but on the whole they prevent the book from becoming the kind of read only a finance junkie could endure.

There are caveats, however. Denby, it has to be said, is not so good at doing emotion. The passages that offer us glimpses of his internal monologue, the italicized pondering and agonized exclamations, fall horribly flat. "Keep your head clear! I shouted at myself. Otherwise you are lost." At one point, Denby’s internal adviser admonishes him to "Take hold of the tech boom. Take hold and ride it hard! There is a pile to be made, an apartment to be saved — not to mention a nest egg to be enlarged." Ride it hard? To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, you’d have to have a heart of stone to read of Denby’s inner turmoil without laughing.

Denby is much better, as might be expected of a critic, at looking at himself and his circumstances from the outside. "A writer with no business experience, a person wary of booms, circumspect by nature," he writes, "had risked falling among the crumpled tulips and rotting railroad ties of a dozen schemes gone bust." Denby’s narrative often aspires to such lyricism — he writes of "the music of money," of money as "the balm that soothes the welts rising on the surface of the middle-aged ego." There are moments when he gets downright spiritual about the market, when he is "a convert lost in a frenzy of devotion," deifying Alan Greenspan and fetishizing fiber optics. Denby’s poetic bent leads to some rather odd juxtapositions: a passage about "a body once loved, a wholeness once achieved" is quickly followed by "Corvis closed at ... 84.72." But this is part of the book’s charm.

At its heart, American Sucker is less about money than it is about time, and the desire to cheat death. "As you push 60, your attitude towards time falls into crisis," Denby says. "Because you realize you don’t have an infinite number of days. Heidegger said, ‘We’re rushing towards our past.’ These two poles, on the one hand this desire to catch up, catch up, catch up to the zipper going around the base of the Time tower or the ticker at the bottom of the screen, and at the other the desire to slow down, to endure, to experience duration. Everything is accelerating our sense of time — the Internet, the stock market, the movies, the pace of American life. So a part of me wants to keep up, keep up, and the other part wants to opt out of that altogether, to sit there and stare at an acorn."

Fortunately for us, in his book Denby spends very little time sitting around staring at acorns. Instead, he swigs NyQuil, mainlines CNBC, dabbles in online smut, reviews a few movies, slaps his head a lot, tries to fit in at trendy parties, weeps openly in the middle of the street, imagines himself soaring above the rooftops of New York (the NyQuil?), gets it on with a woman, and fails to get it up. There are times when the story veers into the arena of farce — such as when Denby has an affair with a married woman and leaves his suit hanging in her closet, where it is discovered by her husband. "The two of us were tempting fate," he writes, "and fate, often lazy and inattentive, on this occasion roused itself and demonstrated a considerable gift for comedy."

And then, in the midst of these emotional and financial pratfalls, Denby falls in love.

The object of Denby’s fervid affection is not a woman but a stock-market maven, a man who, as he says now, "had his finger on the pulse of the future, who could lead me into a paradise of wealth." Denby’s crush hits him as he watches a PowerPoint presentation by the strong-jawed, stridently optimistic Henry Blodget, a hotshot analyst at Merrill Lynch. "[H]is voice was strong and clear," Denby bubbles, adding, with the inarticulateness that so often accompanies infatuation, "He did the big picture."

But then, when it comes to hero worship, Denby proves himself to be a capricious devotee, and he is soon smitten by Sam Waksal, the founder of the biotech company ImClone. "There was a merriment in his eyes," Denby croons as he watches Waksal work the room at a party. "His appetite was irresistible." Throughout American Sucker (the title seems increasingly apropos as the relationship between Denby and Waksal develops), Denby tags around after the CEO, attending his fabulous soirées, trying to absorb his biotech mojo. "I felt like Nick Carraway looking at Gatsby when I was at Sam’s house," he says now. "He was creating this little theater of the intellect with his candles and his white-on-white décor and his flashy talk about big ideas."

Finally, telecommunications guru George Gilder — "St. George of the fibersphere" — gets Denby’s heart racing. In part, the introduction of these secondary characters serves to spare the reader from spending too much time in Denby’s head — to flesh out the narrative, as it were. The arrival of Blodget, Waksal, and Gilder also allows Denby to give physical form to the irrational exuberance that characterized the tech-stock bubble of the late 1990s. At one point, he seems to compare his heroes’ superhuman acuity for making money with the metaphysical abilities of the characters in the film X-Men. From here, things get a bit weird.

Denby is at his computer, at home, reviewing X-Men: "Gravity has given up its remorseless pull. Roll over, Newton; computer imagery has reimagined the laws of time and space." As he writes this, Denby is lifted from his seat by some unseen force (the hand of Adam Smith, perhaps), drifting through an open window into the New York night like some hairy, money-hungry Peter Pan. "Film critic flying!" he hoots. And then, a little later, "The old rules didn’t apply. Fiber optics would enormously speed up communication, biotech would cure diseases and extend healthy life. I couldn’t give up on tech." No, he couldn’t give up. Not even when his stock portfolio began to look more and more like a hobo’s change cup. "Am I mad?" he writes. "Half mad?" He was probably a little of both.

As it turns out, the masterstrokes performed by Denby’s market superheroes were every bit as fabricated as the computer-generated effects he marveled at on the screen. Critics cannot fly. The old rules do still apply — physical and economic. "They were flying and I wanted to fly with them," he says. "I made a dreadful mistake." Denby, of course, wasn’t the only one who came crashing down at the end of the tech-stock fantasy. Blodget, who cynically yelled "Buy!" when he should have at least whispered "Sell," was banned from Wall Street for life and fined $4 million. Waksal was charged with insider trading (along with his pal Martha Stewart), for which he got a $3 million fine and seven years in a federal prison. Gilder got off relatively lightly — he merely lost an excruciating amount of money when NASDAQ went south.

As for Denby, he’s here in this less-than-luxurious apartment, hundreds of thousands of dollars lighter than when he entered the market a little over four years ago.