The world of private equity, as described in Carrie Sun’s memoir, brings to mind less the muscular jockeying of HBO’s Succession, and instead the quiet intensity of a Sofia Coppola film: all glittering surfaces and cagey alienation. When Sun arrives at Carbon, a secretive hedge fund (the name has been changed), she finds offices with sweeping views of Central Park; a library with heavy drapes and velvet couches; a bathroom with marble sinks and stone walls. After employees complain about the state of the toilets, the firm hires a woman to clean them after each and every use.
Sun, 29 at the time, is at a crossroads. She previously worked as a financial analyst before enrolling in, then dropping out of, an MBA programme. Engaged to a man who “wanted me to prioritise him and his career and not work myself”, she is taking a fiction workshop in Manhattan when she is cold-contacted by a recruiter. She responds, saying: “I want a job so I can afford to figure out my life.” At the end of her first day as assistant to Carbon founder and billionaire Boone Prescott (also a pseudonym), high on the prospect of independence, Sun messages the recruiter: “loooong day, BUT I F’ing LOVE MY JOB”. Right after that, she tells a friend that she had “no time to even pee”.
Soon she is going into the office every weekend. She calls the firm’s “go-to limo service” to pick up Prescott from his golf club; talks to an elite retail broker to rent a six-bedroom beach house in Malibu for his surfing holiday; deals with demands such as “find me Mitt Romney’s number”. Sun’s story is inflected with familiar millennial markers – of growing up amid economic precarity and losing oneself in work, only to realise that it won’t save you – and demonstrates the impossible demands put on workers at the highest level of capitalism, as well as the narratives that legitimate such work.
Ultimately Carbon comes across not so much as a place of hedonistic Wall Street excess but one of monastic discipline and “family” values – where the company stands in for your closest relations. Prescott – enigmatic, a lover of extreme sports, a hater of inefficiency – instructs Sun to “put the team over the self, the collective over the individual”. (He also asks, after experiencing the “great leveller” that is passport control, to be signed up to a government programme that allows VIPs to skip the queue.)
Sun writes perspicaciously about how these family values are earnestly bought into, to insidious effect. She muses about how equating work relations with kinship, “invoking concepts of lineage and fatherhood”, oils the wheels of wealth and power, and reinforces the company’s “patrimonial structures”. Yet when it comes to her own state of mind, her insight dims. She describes herself as feeling “blank” on her first day, and this blankness permeates her writing about herself. She describes brutal working conditions and an increasing political unease, but insists she loves her job, often without really explaining why.
This self-alienation is addressed in the closing chapters, as Sun recalls how growing up in her Chinese immigrant family taught her to subordinate her feelings to the pursuit of excellence. Her story, which culminates in her triumphantly deciding to become a writer, is moving but sits awkwardly alongside the foregoing account of vast inequality. Meanwhile aphorisms such as “the capitalism plot and the trauma plot are increasingly the same” feel glib: there are many different types of pain, and many different ways of existing under capitalism, some more comfortable or destructive than others.
At a company retreat, Sun sits through a PowerPoint presentation about Carbon’s long-term ambitions. The first goal is “exceptionally high returns only” for the next 15 years. Then there’s a slide on the firm’s community impact: what it wants to give back to the world. Sun leans in, excited to hear what the management’s vision is. It comprises three letters: “TBD”.
• Private Equity by Carrie Sun is published by Bloomsbury (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
