Confessions of a Wall Street Shoeshine Boy: A Novel

By Doug Stumpf

Book Overview

Brazilian-born Gil is trying to find the American Dream. In the meantime, he polishes the shoes of the superrich and powerful on Wall Street--high-rolling traders as uninhibited as they are ruthless.... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0060889535
• ISBN13: 9780060889531
• Release Date: July 2007
• Publisher: Harper
• Length: 290 Pages
• Weight: 1.14 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.3" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Smart, good read

Stylistically nothing fancy, but achieves transcendence through sheer readability. The ideas on the table are sophisticated and current events would seem to secure the novel's relevance for the foreseeable future. A guilt-free beach book.

Debut Novel Shines

I adored "Confessions of a Wall Street Shoeshine Boy." It is a wickedly funny novel and a deliciously observed tale, much of it told through the ingenius voice of Gil the Brazilian shoeshine boy of the title. Gil doesn't miss much despite his broken english. He's like the boy in the Emperor's new clothes. He sees the American empire stripped bare. Gil is one of the great literary creations to come down the pike in a long time. Funny and outrageous, Confessions not only paints a vivid picture of people and their money, but the plot itself will keep you up all night. Invest in Doug Stumpf's debut novel. It's like having a front seat at the party of the century. The one just before the Fall.

A cupcake full of arsenic

Doug Stumpf's 'Confessions of a Wall Street Shoeshine Boy' - now out in paperback - tells the story of Gil Benicio, a goodhearted, Brazilian shoeshine boy with his face pressed against the glass of Wall Street's voracious getters-and-spenders. It's a delicious read whose time has come. When Gil accidentally stumbles across an insider trading scandal, he turns the story over to Greg Waggoner, a midlevel journalist trying rise to star status at a glossy magazine called, well, 'Glossy.' Stumpf, a senior editor at 'Vanity Fair,' knows and tells all about that world: the jealous jockeying among writers, the envy over salaries, the competition over 'real estate,' esp. the celebrity cover story. It's a comic tale with a refreshing voice, but at its heart we're in Raymond Chandler territory: the world of Wall Street is so powerful, the well meaning protagonists are such small fry, that when the villain of the piece is exposed, the powers-that-be decide he's "too big too take down..." Now's the time to reread Stumpf's novel, when the greed and excesses of Wall Street threaten to take down America's economic foundations, but the institutions who set the dominoes of failure into play are too big to let fail. 'Confessions' --- with wit, flair, and dishy detail - tears the scab off that sore, revealing the nexus of pride, greed, envy, and the mysteries of class: who really has it, and what crimes people will commit to get it. It's a cupcake from the American Dream Factory, laced with arsenic.

Admit to Loving 'Confessions'

What perfect timing to have Doug Stumpf's ingenious, comic novel appear in paperback, just in time for Wall Street's nervous breakdown. Gil Benicio, the Brazilian-born shoeshine boy among the trader-sharks of Wall Street, is a brilliant foil, a comic invention, and that rarest of things, a flesh and blood character. He's what used to be called a small hero of the imagination, and Stumpf's debut novel is large contribution to the ironic chronicling of the downward slide of the American century. A senior editor at Vanity Fair, Stumpf knows the world he skewers with such wit and verve. Gil is wide-eyed in Babylon, and his accented English, which alternately tells the story along with Greg, a "work horse" writer for a glossy magazine who lives in fear of falling out of journalism's thin air club and ending up working a beat for Modern Bride. We learn a lot from Stumpf about the inner workings of a magazine much like Vanity Fair. It's fascinating stuff - a riff about scoring the celebrity profile cover story is worth the price of admission. With a devilish cleverness that is not to be missed, the book is also a terrific piece of cultural archeology -- Wall Street, strippers from Russia, cocaine, supermodels, people who have sold their souls to product placement in the movie they think are living, people who only think they're alive. Confessions of a Wall Street Shoeshine Boy would be a great comic novel if it weren't also so sad. It's a cross between a John Grisham novel and "Sweet Smell of Success." But Stumpf is not done with us yet. The book is also an ingenious, oblique take on ethnicity, or ethnic identity, with the WASP under siege. Want to know how we live now and how we got here, with all that Wall Street sugar melting in the New York Indian summer? Read Confessions of a Wall Street Shoe Shine Boy. And be very entertained, but be afraid -- be very afraid.

The dirty soles on Wall Street

A friend of mine gave me a copy of "Confessions of a Wall Street Shoeshine Boy" after he came upon it in the bookstore. He said he couldn't put it down and I had to read it. He was right--what a fantastic read! This book has it all: a fast-moving plot full of intrigue and unexpected twists, a hilarious and original voice in Gil, the charming and unexpected hero of the story (think the kind of error-prone but rich English-as-second-language narration of Everything Is Illuminated), and subtle satire that throws the class disparities of America and the moral abandon of Wall Street into stark relief. I highly recommend to anyone looking for a quick summer read that packs a punch.