Peter Mountford

The Author

Peter Mountford grew up in Washington, DC, apart from three  years in Sri Lanka during the early stages of the Sri Lankan civil war. In 1999, Peter earned a BA in International Relations, and then spent two years as the token liberal at a think tank. For most of that time, he lived in Ecuador and wrote about Ecuador's economy.

Since graduating from the University of Washington's MFA program in 2006, Peter's short fiction has appeared in Best New American Voices 2008, Conjunctions, The Normal School, Michigan Quarterly Review, Seattle Review, Phoebe, and Boston Review, where he won second place in the 2007 contest, judged by George Saunders. His op-eds have appeared in numerous national newspapers, and his personal essays have appeared in Salon, Granta, and The Atlantic online. He has also won or been shortlisted in contests at New Letters, Florida Review, and Gulf Coast, and his story "Horizon" was named a distinguished story in Best American Short Stories 2008  (ed. Salman Rushdie). Currently in his fourth year as a writer-in-residence for Seattle Arts and Lectures, Peter is a two-time fellow of Yaddo, and was a recipient of recent grants from The Elizabeth George Foundation, Seattle's Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs, and 4Culture.

Peter's first novel, A Young Man's Guide to Late Capitalism, was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2011 and has been named a best book of the year by The Seattle Times, Culture Mob, and The Nervous Breakdown.

His first original screenplay, "I Am Not Werner Erhard," co-written with Steven Schardt, was selected for the 2009 Film Independent Screenwriter's Lab. Also, he has published numerous op-eds in national newspapers. He regularly teaches creative writing classes at the Richard Hugo House and elsewhere.

He currently lives in Seattle with his wife and child.

Interviews with the Author

After graduating from college I met this young woman at a cocktail party, about my age, who was, remarkably, a fellow at a think tank in DC. I told her I'd studied international relations, with a focus on economics.

Two weeks later, I was living in DC interning at the think tank. Another couple months and I was a "researcher," co-authoring reports Those first reports were the subject of articles in the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal. It should have been thrilling, but I was a child -- my most recent job had been flipping burgers at a campus diner -- so I didn't even know enough to be excited. I had no idea that I had just jumped to the head of the line.

Soon I hatched the idea that I'd move to Ecuador, which was going through a dire political and financial crisis at the time. There were regular revolutions and the government had decided to pulp their own currency altogether, just close the central bank and use US dollars instead for all transactions. My bosses said it sounded like a great idea, as long as they didn't have to pay me more than the $10 an hour they were already giving me.

So, I became an "adjunct fellow" of this think tank, living in Quito. It was exciting for a while, but I'd never really pictured myself as a hack economist for a right-wing think tank, so I finally quit and returned to the States.

I hadn't been home long when, reading some articles about Ecuador one day I noticed the think tank had published one of my pieces. The byline indicated that I was a "senior associate of EMG." I had never heard of EMG, so I looked it up, and learned that it was a financial consulting firm, which operated a dubious-sounding hedge fund, and they had the same mailing address as my erstwhile, and ostensibly non-profit think tank.

My resume was a confusing document for a while there: recent jobs included tending bar in a dingy pool hall and being a senior associate of a financial consulting firm called The Emerging Markets Group.

That's when I started writing fiction in earnest. It seemed like the only sensible thing to do.

As recent history has demonstrated, the financial world is more dynamic, dramatic, fascinating, and far more human, far more personal, than people used to assume. The failure of North American fiction writers to approach this subject with any of the intelligence or nuance that they bring to bear on, say, suburban malaise, seems to me really bizarre. We get satires poking fun at the soulless bean counters, and other kinds of ideologically comfortable polemics and caricatures, but too often writers don't have a working knowledge of economics or finance, which results in a flattening of the people and the issues.

And it happened that I had some valuable experience in the world of finance.. Halfway through the book, the global economy did a face-plant. In the first draft, I had felt obliged to explain to my reader what a hedge fund was, but history intervened on my behalf, so I was able to cut that stuff.

They emerged unconsciously, at first. That's the honest truth. Dr. Freud would, I'm sure, want to have a talk to me about that, but it's true.

Once it dawned on me what was going on, I realized it was one of the most important aspects of the novel. Gabriel is terribly uncertain about the shape his identity should take, and as a result he's always under the sway of one or another of these women: he looks to them for cues, for affection, for lashings, and they either give him or don't give him what he seeks, because they're very different people. Ultimately, it's a surprisingly matriarchal novel, especially given the title. The young men, for the most part, are absolute buffoons.

Well, I feel a lot of sympathy for him although I realize that he's not your typical charming swashbuckler of a protagonist. He's hapless, especially at first, and understandably terrified of failure, but eventually he gets the hang of it. He means well, but his good intentions get subsumed in an oncoming wave of other concerns. It's one thing to mean well when you're surrounded by loved ones, but quite another when you're in the kind of high-pressure situation that Gabriel finds himself in. He embodies the basest sides of me with the volume turned up, so I feel a little protective of him as a result. There was a time in my life when I would have done exactly what he does.

There's an idea floating in our culture that poverty imprisons people and wealth liberates them. The fallacy of that paradigm, which is not merely untrue but often the inverse of the truth, is something that Gabriel once, briefly -- when he first visited Bolivia while in college -- could see. But that clarity of vision is terribly difficult to sustain when you live in the United States, where one is assaulted, daily, with ways to feel lust and shame for and about money. That his revelation was ephemeral is the greatest tragedy of his life.

Bolivia is a geographically outrageous place, more moon than earth, and its history is rife with unbelievable tragicomedy. The landmass used to include what's now northern Chile, but Bolivia hoisted the tax on bat guano (an ingredient in gunpowder) in the coastal cliffs, and Chile fought back. That's how Bolivia came to be landlocked -- in a war over bat shit. But they still have a standing navy. File that in the department of wishful thinking.

Bolivia is also the poorest country in South America. Its leaders, who have typically been pale-skinned and ivy-league educated, have been wildly corrupt and vile. And then Bolivia elected Evo Morales, its first indigenous leader (the country is 70% indigenous, mind you). Evo's as easy to vilify as he is to heroize, a complexity that I love. He's reckless as all get out: there was a video recently of him playing soccer recently against some political rivals and he just kicked an opponent in the balls. He was a farmer before he became president, and he's not very educated, but thanks to his wacky cocktail of policies, Bolivia is doing better than it has in a hundred years.

The long and short of it is that I'm center left. I agree with Jon Stewart on everything except for issues involving economics, which he tends to oversimplify, in which case I'm with Paul Krugman. With economics, if the answer looks obvious, you're probably not thinking about it hard enough.

I think it was Auden who said, "Great art is clear thinking about mixed feelings." That's a crucial idea for me, especially with this material.

I watched the fairly recent film adaptation of The Crucible the other day, and there was a beautiful argument at some point between Daniel Day-Lewis's character and his wife. They were both completely right, but they also disagreed completely. I live for those moments.

That's more or less the crux of the book. The strategies employed for financial gain by the "nefarious" hedge fund are not, finally, very different from the strategies employed by a couple falling in love, or even a "virtuous" liberal like Gabriel's mother. Everyone is advancing their personal agendas, and sometimes those agendas are attractive and sometimes they aren't, sometimes they run parallel with each other and sometimes they don't, but that doesn't change how the system operates. Even a love story is a negotiation, with shifting terms, between two people.

The problem for Gabriel, as it is for many ambitious people, is that he is completely entranced by the game immediately in front of him, the 2-3 moves ahead, but the game is longer than that. This is exactly what happened to the players in Wall Street's investment banks, too, who were so desperate to reap gains in the quarter at hand that they ignored the long term and ended up destroying themselves, with catastrophic effects for the rest of us.