But I suspect that things might have turned out almost as badly as they did for Turney Duff, a callow, young hedge fund trader who writes of his own noteworthy flameout in a bracing new Wall Street memoir called “The Buy Side” (Crown, 320 pages).

Mr. Duff’s tale calls to mind books like “Bright Lights, Big City,” by Jay McInerney, and especially “Liar’s Poker,” by Michael Lewis — stories of wide-eyed newcomers confronted by the temptations of moneyed New York. As literature, it doesn’t rise to the same class. As spectacle, it easily trumps both.

Mr. Duff makes millions, pays brand-name rappers to perform at his birthday party and marries a glamorous singer. But instead of riding into the sunset, he ends up retreating to sumptuous hotel suites where he inhales piles of cocaine, swills Scotch and watches pornographic movies. By himself.

Along the way, by his own admission, Mr. Duff becomes a caricature of the arrogant young Wall Streeter that so much of America loves to hate. If “The Buy Side” is remembered for any single line, it will be the remark that Mr. Duff says he uttered one evening upon confronting a lengthy queue outside a downtown Manhattan nightclub. Barging past the bouncers, he announces: “I don’t stand in lines. I snort them.” He and his trading pals think the joke so hilarious that they later emblazon it on souvenir T-shirts.

A middle-class kid from Maine, Mr. Duff began his career in 1994, in the early years of the hedge fund era, when he arrived in New York as a fresh-faced journalism graduate from Ohio University. Unable to land a job in writing or anything else, he reaches out to an uncle on Wall Street, who arranges interviews with several of the big firms. Mr. Duff aces the one at Morgan Stanley by recapping the previous evening’s episode of “Melrose Place,” the interviewer’s favorite television show. Hey, so much for that diploma.

One of the book’s strengths is Mr. Duff’s self-awareness. He realizes what he became. At Morgan, where he spent five years as a desk assistant, he knew little about Wall Street and learned even less about investing, acknowledging that he was too lazy to read research. Where he thrived was after the closing bell, when he proved adept at staging office parties and leading his peers — and a few higher-ups — through the assorted watering holes he frequented.

His light-bulb moment comes one evening when he successfully introduces a group of pretty girls to a senior trader. “I realize I’m in my element,” he writes. “I feel in total control and at ease. Only in looking back can I see how seminal this moment is. I would never be able to stand out at my job. There I’m out-experienced, out-connected and out-degreed. But here, with a glass in hand, I have as good a chance as any to move and shake.”

Mr. Duff puts his social skills to good use when, unable to secure an actual trading job at Morgan, he moves to an up-and-coming hedge fund, the Galleon Group — the same Galleon Group that was eviscerated in Wall Street’s continuing insider-trading scandals.

As a “buy side” trader executing transactions for senior portfolio managers, he is a conduit to the “sell side” traders at the big Wall Street firms who actually carry out his trades. Mr. Duff’s decisions on how and where to allocate his trades make him of crucial importance to the sell-side traders, who earn commissions on them.

It is Mr. Duff’s portrait of how sell-side traders ardently romance their buy-side counterparts that is probably the book’s most memorable contribution to Wall Street literature. He takes everything they offer: booze, dinners, Super Bowl tickets, private jets to Las Vegas weekends, parties in South Beach, lots of cocaine and, while at Galleon, scads of tips that move stocks. One of his mentors, a trader named David Slaine, ended up cooperating with the government’s Galleon investigation, but the scandal proves peripheral to the book.

WHAT stays with you is the portrait of a young man who seemingly never met a temptation he could deny.

For a time, Mr. Duff rides high, earning million-dollar bonus checks, renting a TriBeCa triplex with drop-dead Hudson River views and eventually adding a wife, a Long Island manse and a beloved daughter. But the drugs soon take hold, and his long downward spiral grows uglier at every turn. After two stays in rehabilitation facilities, he loses the trading job he took after leaving Galleon, then his marriage and the real estate. The financial crisis does the rest, and today, Mr. Duff says, he tries to make a living writing from a tiny apartment in Long Island City, Queens.

Mr. Duff proves a fine wordsmith; his prose is smooth, lean and rhythmic. Where the book misfires — badly — is when he tries to plumb the existential side of things, or to employ literary artifice. There is one cringe-worthy chapter about his girlfriend (who would become his wife), where he begins every few paragraphs with a letter, “I,” then “I L,” and so on, which of course ends up spelling out “I LOVE YOU.” It made me want to throw the book across the room.

Almost as bad is his “Bud Fox” moment, the obligatory episode in these lost-in-Manhattan memoirs when the protagonist must replicate that memorable scene from Wall Street when Charlie Sheen, having sacrificed himself to Gordon Gekko and the gods of capitalism, stares out at the Manhattan skyline and asks, plaintively, “Who am I?”

Mr. Duff’s moment comes the morning after his 34th birthday party, when he wakes on the roof deck of his triplex, fires up a marijuana cigarette and realizes how hollow all his newfound wealth and party-hardy friends make him feel. “Why,” he wonders, “do I feel so empty?” My bet was all that cocaine; whatever the reason, I didn’t much care. I just wanted to smack the guy.

That said, this is an entertaining and cautionary tale, well worth your time. I can imagine parents out there who might give it to children pondering Wall Street careers. Of course, should it excite rather than frighten your budding Bud Fox, you might consider urging an alternative career path.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/02/business/in-buy-side-a-wall-street-traders-crash-landing.html?partner=rss&emc=rss