Book review: The Buy Side by Turney Duff

In Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, based on Jordan Belfort’s titular memoir, the broker keeps a stable of fancy cars, snorts coke off a woman’s bottom, and holds crass competitions where dwarves are hurled across the office.

The shenanigans in Turney Duff’s memoir may not be quite as extreme, but they’re in the same spirit. Duff, a former trader at the now-defunct Wall Street hedge-fund company, Galleon Group, has spun a good yarn about his dizzying years in the fast lane. The Buy Side is one in a glut of financial “confessional” books released since Lehman Brothers’ 2008 collapse, and certainly not the only memoir of its kind. Geraint Anderson’s Cityboy: Beer and Loathing in the Square Mile from that same year offered an inside look at London’s big-money firms, as just one example.

What makes The Buy Side stand out is the writing. Duff turns his life story into a novelesque account with a well-defined beginning, middle and end. He casts a lucid look on his past and delivers a redemptive tale that makes the reader feel less like a voyeur.

The book opens with Duff, a journalism graduate, job hunting in New York. Stonewalled by every publication he approaches, he calls his Uncle Tucker, who works in finance, and soon finds himself employed in a world he would never have chosen for himself. He joins Galleon, where he is told to expect to get fired every day; if he isn’t, he can consider it a good day.

As a “buy-side” guy whose job is to invest in other firms’ financial assets, he gets courted around the clock by eager young salesmen, dines at the finest restaurants, and attracts women in a way he never used to. Eventually, he even finds love. One action-packed evening, a muscular colleague presses a bag of cocaine into the palm of his hand. Duff tastes the stuff, feels his tongue go numb, and decides it’s not for him. The next time around, he’s far less squeamish, and soon develops a drug habit.

He becomes a regular at an Upper East Side apartment called “the White House” where coke is stashed in the microwave and black American Express cards are used to cut it. The young hosts aim to please him and other clients. “Tonight they were kind enough to order in,” he writes: “Chinese and Mexican escorts.”

Reading The Buy Side makes you wonder what this first-time author will come up with next. Perhaps he’ll put his journalist hat on and profile another of Wall Street’s colourful characters. If he does, Duff’s writing skills will doubtless deliver another entertaining read.

Order for £11.69 (free p&p) from the Independent Bookshop: 08430 600 030