Carl Swanson in New York:
The initial public offering of Dana Vachon’s first novel, the Wall Street satire Mergers & Acquisitions, was still a few weeks off when we met for lunch at Le Colonial, a sort of Indochina theme restaurant on East 57th Street where the ceiling fans turn slowly and even the wait staff seem stunned by the nonexistent tropical humidity. Vachon is 28 and dressed for a Saturday of shopping in downtown Greenwich, in a blazer and open-necked Ralph Lauren shirt and loafers. He’d suggested this place because it was where the send-off party was held for Roger Thorne—the name of a character in his book—when he “left to be a war profiteer.” Except that never happened in the book. Oh, he meant the real-life Thorne, the one he met at JPMorgan, where he started interning in his sophomore year in college in 2000 and went to work in 2002.
More here.