BIO: Katerina Grishakova is a writer living on the East Coast. She came to the US from Moscow in 1996 and spent more than a decade working on Wall Street. She retired early to focus on creative writing.
Q: How is this novel different from other Wall Street books?
A: Most of the books about Wall Street aim to glorify its subjects. They’re written in a peculiar ‘behold our depravity, and despair’ style. I always got the feeling that the authors chase easy, surface sensationalism rather than try to ponder on the deeper source of their subjects’ sociopathy. And, perhaps, such approach is intentional: that’s what sells. But neither the Wolf of Wall Street, nor The Big Short, nor Liar’s Poker are interested in what’s behind a finance bro’s public face. (Not to mention that the Wolf of Wall Street never even worked on Wall Street.) Those books give us juicy bits of behind the scenes shenanigans, they dazzle and shock us with depravity, but leave us in the dark as to the origin of those shenanigans. We’re left with the idea that those people are driven by greed, but there’s more to their behavior than greed. There’s some lack of fulfillment, some emptiness, some deeper discontent. That discontent is the focus of The Hermit.
Q: Who is Andy Sylvain, your main character?
A: Andy Sylvain is a middle-aged bond trader, a Master of the Universe, to use Tom Wolfe’s famous designation. He lives a comfortable life: a mansion in Westchester, a pied-a-terre in Manhattan, a younger girlfriend, and enough money to not have to work anymore. In his spare time he and the members of his financial community attend silly but lavish costume parties at prime Manhattan locations, which is where we first meet him. And yet something weighs on him, some unexplained dissatisfaction the source of which he can’t define. He begins to see the spiritual emptiness of his occupation, but is lost as to what could be done about it, or whether anything should be done at all.
Q: What inspired you to write this novel and do you have any literary influences that guide your book?
A: The question of why high-paid professionals with enough money to retire and enjoy life almost never do it gnawed me for a long time. I find this topic quite fascinating and also not sufficiently explored in modern literature and in a broader pop culture. I observed such men over time –– I spent more than a decade on Wall Street –– and I’ve concluded that the reason is not money per se, but a kind of built-in inertia, the fear of stopping, of being rendered irrelevant by their social circles. To try to describe this phenomenon I had to reach to earlier classics for inspiration and for style. Moby Dick is referenced in the first chapter, although Bartleby the Scrivener would be even more relevant to the main theme. I’d also name Joseph Conrad whose riveting storytelling I was trying to imitate, and Vladimir Nabokov, whose works I studied for ideas on style and details, like description of social gatherings, or characters’ personal traits, gestures, and facial expressions. And deep in the background, like an all-seeing eye, looms Dostoyevsky, one of the best scholars of human folly.
Q: There are a lot of dualities, the opposite notions at play in this novel: the city and the woods; power and helplessness; reason and irrationality. Is there a takeaway from this tug-of-war?
A: I’m not a determinist. I subscribe to the idea that the uncertainty is an inherent feature of our world. Opposite notions can exist in one person. There’s no algorithm that can predict a person’s behavior. One can be a Master of the Universe and be unable to make a decision. One can be a math genius and go live in the woods, like Alexander Grothendieck. This irrationality, unpredictability is what makes us different from a code, from AI, it’s what gives us our humanity. As for a takeaway, I think a good fiction is not supposed to give definitive answers. It’s supposed to describe a phenomenon, a problem with all its nuances and contradictions, and let the reader ponder on it. I hope that’s what this novel did.
