Author Andrew Lipstein on ‘The Vegan’ and morality

This is an audio transcript of the FT Weekend podcast episode: ‘Author Andrew Lipstein on ‘The Vegan’ and morality’

Lulu Smyth
Have you ever been to a dinner party where everything’s great? The drinks are good, the food’s amazing, the conversations flowing. But there’s one person there who was so obnoxious, so unbelievably grating that you just wish you could make them leave. There’s a book I read recently called The Vegan, and it starts out with exactly that premise. This hedge fund manager called Herschel is throwing a dinner party. He’s actually trying to impress his rich new neighbours and to make things smoother, he invites along an old friend. But she turns out to be a complete nightmare. Here’s how the book’s author, Andrew Lipstein, describes what happens.

Andrew Lipstein
And seeing early on that it’s a mistake, Herschel, it’s not much of a spoiler but he basically spikes her drink with a ZzzQuil, which is a sleep aid, and that works in getting her out of their way. And they have a great night. And then soon after, he realises that this may have had a terrible effect on her and she is in the hospital with a traumatic brain injury.

Lulu Smyth
Herschel spends the rest of the book finding ways to make up for what he’s done, and the big one is he becomes vegan.

Andrew Lipstein
I think we’ve all been there, right? Like we wake up one morning and we realise the night before we said something, like, insensitive or we weren’t the person we wanted to be. And we have this lingering sense of guilt that there’s literally nothing we can do with. And we might end up finding just another way to make up for that. It has nothing to do with the original action.

Lulu Smyth
I love The Vegan because it’s funny and smart and it grapples with ethical questions in a really sensitive way. On the one hand, Herschel’s newfound obsession with animal rights seems performative. It’s like he just wants to appear to be a good person. But he’s also genuinely affected by having caused someone harm.

Andrew Lipstein
Going into the book, I wanted to slowly pass from me to the reader this question of is Herschel good or not in a way that it’s not really ever even noticed. And by the end of the book, I want the reader to feel like it is only up to them and it is their responsibility to do so.

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Lulu Smyth
Today on the show, I’m talking to Andrew about his novel, about morality, and about the stories we tell ourselves to justify how we behave. This is FT weekend. I’m Lulu Smyth, in for Lilah Raptopoulos.

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Andrew Lipsetin, welcome to FT Weekend.

Andrew Lipstein
Thank you so much for having me.

Lulu Smyth
And so we’re here to talk about your latest novel, The Vegan, which came out this summer. And I feel like it’s a book that so many people are talking about. It’s one of my favourite books. I keep trying to recommend it to people. So yeah, I’d love to kind of get into the themes of the book. But first, can we just start with Herschel, the main character? What’s he like? How would you kind of describe him?

Andrew Lipstein
Herschel is somebody who I think on a superficial level, we all know, at least from media, TV shows and books and movies, which is the finance guy. Almost like the capital F, capital G, finance guy. He’s somebody who is extremely ambitious. He’s somebody who wants to do that dreaded word, disrupt a market. And he is sort of like a blend of . . . he has a start-up. It’s almost like a start-up hedge fund. So he’s sort of the blend of the two worst contemporary tropes we have, at least for rich men. But he also, of course, with any character that we get to know, is not someone who is free from morality. And that was that was fun for me as a writer, the starting point for the novel.

If I’m going to write a book about the nature of goodness and how somebody fights to reclaim their own goodness and define it, how can I choose sort of like the least likely character for this journey I’m about to go on? And, you know, I really enjoy financial media. I consume a lot of it. And when I just thought of inventing this character, I thought maybe I can interview a few people like him. And as soon as I had that thought, I just said, yes, I need . . . This is going to be the character just so I can have these conversations. And I basically interviewed a handful of quant hedge fund CEOs and analysts to sort of figure out who this person is.

Lulu Smyth
That makes sense because it feels, I mean, reading it, he’s also, I should say, an avid FT reader. So, we might tap into a bit of that, but there are sort of assumptions that people make about hedge fund managers, especially when they appear in fiction. That’s like Gordon Gekko and Patrick Bateman in American Psycho, Money by Martin Amis. It’s, like, it really is that sort of textbook caricature villain. But he feels very, it feels very authentic and very sort of human. So I guess what led you to make him a hedge fund manager specifically?

Andrew Lipstein
Yeah, I think any character that as a culture or as a media consuming body we think we know but has never really been given depth. It was a very attractive proposition to me. And, you know, you talk about greed and its attending flaws like selfishness and individuality in the worst way. And you sort of sense that that precludes all other aspects of a dynamic person, but they don’t. And I think that is the beauty of fiction, is that you, if it works and if it succeeds, you never get the stereotype of the caricature, and it is always subverting your assumptions.

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Lulu Smyth
So the poisoning incident kicks off the book and from there Herschel’s basically trying to figure out how to atone for what he’s done. But he doesn’t want to confess to what’s happened or to confront it directly. Instead, it’s almost like he’s trying to amass good personal points by becoming a vegan. So after this incident of the party, Herschel becomes repulsed by the idea of eating meat. Why was it meat-eating that he’s turned off. What is it about that issue?

Andrew Lipstein
Yeah. I think that’s a great question, and it’s actually one that I haven’t really been asked before. It sort of seems obvious. It’s kind of, and not to be provocative or ruffling feathers, fully transparent, I am a vegetarian, not a vegan. But I think the way that people arrive at certain life choices sometimes can come equally from a need to pay off their moral debts as a need to achieve moral surplus or goodness or they find something that they think is, you know, righteous or good. But for him, I mean, in the book, one of the neighbours they’re trying to impress — Philip — is a vegetarian and it’s never directly stated, but I think things like that tend to germinate in our heads. And on Herschel’s quest, you know, the thinness of his need to be good is revealed over time. And I think there’s something really interesting about goodness as a relative currency.

I think there’s so many ways that, especially in writing this book and doing interviews, I realised how much morality and money are like each other. And I think one of maybe three or four ways is that there’s a certain relativism to each of those. I don’t think morality has to be relative. I think, you know, originally probably it was used to build trust in a community. It doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game. But I think that if we want to call ourselves a good person, that question often implicitly comes with the question of how am I compared to other people? How am I compared to those who are immediately around me, and so to speak, my neighbour?

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Lulu Smyth
If at this point you’re thinking that this all sounds pretty heavy, I can assure you that The Vegan is not heavy at all. It’s poignant, but it’s also really funny and lightly written. There are these really absurd moments which almost make you want to laugh out loud, but it’s also not really clear whether you should be laughing.

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There’s also an incredible scene about halfway through where Hercshel breaks into Prospect Park Zoo at night and has a face-off with a panda. And I don’t want to spoil it for listeners, but I wondered what you were sort of trying to say, like how it reflects Herschel’s character and what he’s going through.

Andrew Lipstein
That scene and a few other moments in the book bring up this word satire, which some people have called the book, and either take it for granted or ask me if I consider it a satire. And there are these certain moments of the book that, if you just describe them, seem absurd. And the scene you’re referring to, he basically breaks into the zoo, finds a red panda and becomes naked in front of it, basically to create a relationship to the panda or that of animals. And there are certain scenes like this where if you just describe them, they seem laughable or absurd.

But I think when you actually believe in something and people who are enlightened in any way often cross this threshold where there’s no coming back from, where your actions do seem absurd only to the uninitiated. And there’s nothing absurd or satirical or funny about these ideas or events to Herschel or to anyone in sort of enlightenment. But from the outside, our laughter is almost like a defence mechanism. But scenes like that are in the book basically to prod the reader to make them think, yeah, this is funny, but can you also find it not funny? Can you see things from Herschel’s point of view? And in that way sort of indoctrinate them or indoctrinate part of them into the journey he’s going through.

Lulu Smyth
You know, so much of this book is about kind of questioning our notions of virtue and the stories that people tell themselves in order to justify how they behave. And I’m interested in what you think about how Herschel’s sort of way of engaging with his own guilt and motivations might reflect something about how people think about morality right now. I mean, not sort of trying to generalise it too much, but was there something that you noticed in the way that people assessed themselves that sort of led to you wanting to address some of these questions?

Andrew Lipstein
Yeah, that’s a great question. I’m going to say the word capitalism, not to become another one of these novelists who takes every interview to prove their liberal bona fides. But I think that there is something very interesting about how an idea of a free market has impacted the idea of morality, how those two ideas have collided. And it has nothing to do with actual capitalism, of course. But I think more and more we’re thinking of morality as something with a single figure attached to it. Like, the value of our bank account. And that a debt in one part of your life can be repaid by a surplus in another.

I also think that we’re starting to think of morality as extremely relative to other people. And I think the easiest way that this is done, especially in America and Britain, actually where we have such a two-sided political system, is that each side of the spectrum has sort of given the other a moral underclass relative to their own point of view. And so we’ve all become ostensibly richer by thinking of the people on the other side of the aisle. But that actually means, from their point of view, we’re poorer.

Lulu Smyth
Yeah, I’ve noticed that you’ve said a couple of times now how money and morality are similar, which I feel is quite counterintuitive. Can you explain sort of what you mean by that?

Andrew Lipstein
Yeah, I fundamentally feel that if you if you look at morality and virtue and how it’s treated in society and culture, just being as brutally honest about the effects of it, I’m not someone who thinks that . . . I’m not someone who’s allergic to the word virtue. And I hate the term virtue-signalling. And I think all those debates are incredibly reductive. I just think we should be as wary of the morally rich as the rich-rich. I think if somebody has a surplus of morality in a public way, we should just acknowledge what they get in return.

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Lulu Smyth
One thing to know about Andrew is that alongside being a novelist, he actually works in finance. And that’s not just to pay the rent. It’s a career. He’s currently at the investing app Robinhood. So he’s got a front-row view of this world that he’s written about. But I also wondered how he makes it all work with novel writing. [music playing] So I’m interested in and how those two things kind of interact. Is being a novelist in working in finance satisfying to different sides to your personality, or does your career kind of feed into your writing? Like, do you need to sort of have that as a stimulus just to help you write the rest of . . . you know, how do you balance those things?

Andrew Lipstein
I’m a firm believer in, well, first of all, like, the elasticity of how many hours you have in the day, but also giving yourself the most life experience you can outside of your writing. I don’t think reading is life. I don’t think reading essays is life. I don’t think listening to podcasts about books and literature and studying is life.

Lulu Smyth
Look at that. (laughter)

Andrew Lipstein
(laughter) It is part of life. It’s a great thing to do, especially buying the products of your sponsors as well. But no, and I think the workplace, it’s like basically a pressure cooker for social interaction. I don’t think there’s more interesting dynamics in life than in a workplace. And not in the way of, like, interactions and relationships that are specific to the workplace, but just how people have to deal with each other and deal with status and deal with trade-offs and compromise and personalities and hide themselves and show themselves. But I mean, I also I also love my job. I love my career. It’s not a detractor from my writing. It’s an add to it.

Lulu Smyth
Yeah. Andrew, as my last question, I wonder if you have a defence for Herschel. Like, why would people want to be around him for an entire book?

Andrew Lipstein
Yeah, I think Herschel has flaws that make him a recognisable character and almost a type, but I think he also has flaws that can’t possibly be of a type because they’re flaws that we all share and we’re all real people. You know, he on the surface is ambitious, but he’s also somebody who really not only wants to be good, but figure out what that means to him. I think that’s a journey that not one person who’s worth knowing is not on and they’re always going to be on. I think if any character, especially in first person, is to succeed, the closer you get to them, the less you feel that they are predictable or a type or somebody that you could easily describe to another person. And I hope that a reader comes away from the book both feeling that they know him and not wanting to describe him to somebody else because they feel like they won’t be describing the real person that he is.

Lulu Smyth
Andrew, thanks so much for coming on the show. This was so fun.

Andrew Lipstein
Thank you so much for having me, Lulu.

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Lulu Smyth
The Vegan by Andrew Lipstein is available now. He’s also already got plans for his next novel, which will be called, Something Rotten, and come out in early 2025.

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That’s the show this week. Thank you for listening to the FT Weekend podcast from the Financial Times. Next week I’m talking to the indie rock harpist Mary Lattimore, whose music I love and who’s doing something really different with the harp. I’m Lulu Smyth and here’s my brilliant team. Katya Kumkova is our senior producer. Molly Nugent is our contributing producer. Our sound engineers are Breen Turner and Sam Giovinco. With original music by Metaphor Music. Topher Forhecz is our executive producer. Monique Mulima is our intern. And our global head of audio is Cheryl Brumley. Special thanks this week to Mischa Frankl-Duval. Have a wonderful weekend and we’ll find each other again next week.