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Then it was off to Duke. He pledged Kappa Sigma ("they were like a band of Mercutios"), wrote some humor columns for The Chronicle, and decided not to care about grades, or even most of his classes. His book jacket brags of his graduating "cum nihil," but that's not all fair either: He was a serious student of the subjects that appealed to him. He spent many days at the home of classics professor Keith Stanley—"my hero," he calls him—sipping wine and talking passionately about God and the inevitable fall of the American empire. Plus, Vachon felt as if there were an entire social education to be won at Duke just by observing.
"Duke is a flagrantly mediocre institution in terms of instruction," he says. "What you got there was an introduction to the haute bourgeoisie. You got kids from all the best places in the country, and you learned their mannerisms, and you learned their lingo, and you learned what they do. You had friends whose parents were writers. You had friends whose parents were in banking. And that's the function of the American education system. Whether Duke University knows it or not, it has no interest in making you an enlightened being. Its interest is in socializing you."
In the book, when his alter-ego Tommy Quinn describes both the Westchester public school and college (Georgetown) he attended as merely "decent," it's very much Vachon talking. It's a point of religion with him, a belief so great that it fuels his writing, that his is an outsider's position in the world of high society—no Ivy League pedigree, not a big enough inheritance to retire on at twenty-two. There are gradations, and he wasn't born on the very top one. So when asked about a reviewer who suggested that his book was about "the hardship of being a rich person who isn't like the other rich people," he seizes the opportunity to clarify.
"I was very shocked that certain people reading it couldn't see how different Quinn was from Roger Thorne," he says several weeks after the critique appeared on "Gawker," Manhattan's most popular media blog. "Thorne's got ten million dollars somewhere, and his father has 100 million. Quinn's still privileged, but he's not like the rest of them. It's like one of those tricks of perspective, right? Where I have a point here and a point here"—he's holding his two index fingers out parallel to the ground, one slightly above the other—"but I'm standing so far back, they begin to line up. The more bourgeois you are, though, the more you see the separation, and the more it makes sense. Which is why the book is flying off the shelves in Rye and Greenwich. People read it and are like, 'Oh, this poor kid!' "
May 2005. That's when the book sold, and Dana Vachon: Media Sensation was born. Before then, he was another Duke grad kicking it as a work-all-day slave at a bank, basically getting rich. No shame in that. His father was a portfolio manager, and Vachon had been working at JPMorgan Chase for about three years at that point, not counting his pre-senior year internship. Problem was, he hated it. Was as unhappy as he'd ever been. Couldn't bear the tedium of his duties. It got so bad that instead of studying spreadsheets, he began work on a series of Warhol-inspired portraits of his cubicle-mate.
"They were generally thought to be excellent likenesses," he says.
But nothing cut the Wall Street blues for Vachon like writing. He felt as if he were finally doing something, creating, and he took to it feverishly. He landed a coveted Arts & Leisure feature in The New York Times about whether "a few well-placed bills" could replace tickets at big-name concerts. And he published a prophetic piece about the John Kerry campaign for The American Conservative. He also had his blog, which he called "DNasty" and which fancifully mishmashed fiction together with horror stories from work. There, his gift for satire and eye for social absurdity were on full display, and it became an online hit at just the right time: when the book world was first scouring blogs for talent.
"The blog," Vachon once said, "didn't birth the book. But it birthed David." Meaning David Kuhn, the magazine editor-turned-literary agent described by multiple sources as the Ari Gold (Jeremy Piven's character from Entourage) of the book world—the guy you want repping you, and decidedly not the guy you want staring back from the other end of the negotiating table. Kuhn was tipped off to DNasty by a friend at a dinner party and found himself instantly smitten. "I didn't need to read that many of his pieces," Kuhn explains. "With him, you read one and you know it: This guy is a natural Writer, capital 'w.' But he had to go from being a banker working eighteen hours a day wanting to be a writer, to actually being a writer."
So they worked. Vachon, twenty-four at the time, pounded out a few sample chapters of M&A. Kuhn edited them. And they went back and forth like that—building characters, ensuring the plot wasn't getting bogged down in asides—until finally they sent a portion of the book out to publishers, hoping there'd be interest.
There was interest. Plenty. Publishers loved the book, and, not insignificantly, they loved Vachon. This last part was important because the book industry is a notoriously bad business. Five hundred and fifty-seven years since Guttenberg invented the printing press, and still nobody knows what makes consumers choose one book over another. Time and again, the industry has eschewed basic practices like market research when deciding which books to buy, relying instead on squishy indicators like feel. And along came Vachon, who appeared as bankable as they come: possessed of charm, symmetrical features, and a yen for writing about money and sex and class. Plus, he was young. The New York media spends a great deal of its marketing dollars cultivating the idea of the young genius, the Next Big Thing. From Jonathan Safran Foer (Everything is Illuminatedl) to Benjamin Kunkel (Indecision), to name just two recent examples, he's the one—and it's typically a he—upon whom adulation is heaped and hopes are hung. For better or for worse, precociousness sells.
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