Infinite Books

“The Vegan” by Andrew Lipstein starts with a slightly Woody Allen vibe of a Manhattan apartment party where Hershel Caine and his beautiful wife Franny invited another influential couple and a friend, Birdie, to, hopefully, establish good social connections. Hershel is a thirty-eight-year-old hedge fund manager leading a happy, stable life, and the future looks bright and wealthy. But a thoughtless prank at the party, which may or may not impact sending Birdie to a hospital, where she falls into a coma, changed everything.

Now, Hershel feels guilty, and the only creatures he finds understand him are animals: a bird on the street, a neighbor’s dog, and two lizards he acquired at a pet shop. He sees animals as living in their own world, feeling lonely but strangely close to him. Suddenly, he is repulsed by the sight of meat and becomes a vegan. Adding to his frustration is the situation at his company: an algorithm that was supposed to predict how stocks would perform is doing more than that – it’s changing the way the stock market works, so it becomes ethically wrong for Hershel to promote it. Try to tell it to Milosz and Simo, the firm’s brilliant software developers, and to a greedy investor discussing his options!

The sudden conversion of Hershel is just fascinating to follow. This is not a midlife crisis or a naive Thoreauian dream of union with wilderness, initiated by guilt, but an idea born from trying to understand humans’ connection with other beings and nature. “Language let us forget the sights and sounds of the world, the wheel let us transcend our bodies, artificial light let us control night and day, photography let us outsource and manipulate our memories, books and phones and the internet reduced distances to a point, denied Earth its immensity.”

It might sound like such a heavy subject would make this novel difficult, but it’s the opposite. This book is hard to put down, both philosophical and humorous, written in beautiful language, touching on subjects of financial investors, conformism, lifestyle status, art, accepting one’s roots, fitting in, and sticking out. I haven’t been entranced by the book like this in a long time! All elements – the protagonist, the background, and the excellent supporting characters create a novel that moved me into reflecting on our connection with nature and was very entertaining at the same time. I was both surprised (this was my first book by Andrew Lipstein, as I didn’t read his “Last Resort” yet) and very impressed! I highly recommend it.

THE VEGAN by Andrew Lipstein, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023