Double dose of American hedonism

Ben Mezrich: Ugly Americans
Jessica Cutler: The Washingtonienne

If you needed any more proof that the neo-American dream of money, sex and power is powerful, here's a double dose. Both these books are fictional accounts of real people trying to get a lifelong hit of that hedonism — by making money (the hero of Ugly Americans) or by sleeping with men who make money (the heroine of The Washingtonienne). It seems America's young graduates are still tying themselves into gender straitjackets — Monica Lewinsky or Barings Bank destroyer Nick Leeson being the models of choice.

Jessica Cutler bases her novel on her own blogs of sleeping around in America's capital, otherwise known as "Hollywood for the Ugly", whereas the ugliness of Ben Mezrich's titular characters refers to their greed in playing the financial markets of the Far East.

Mezrich, usually a thriller writer, paints a humid, seedy picture of Tokyo in slightly purple prose, from the opening sentence: "The breeze was thick and hot and weighed down with the stench of cigarettes, alcohol, cheap perfume, and dead fish". John Malcolm, a Princeton football player with no financial experience, is approached by a shady but brilliant American financial trader to work for him in Japan. He eventually accepts, and has to keep pinching himself that he, a poor kid from New Jersey, has tumbled into a world of Ducati bikes, sex parlours catering to every fetish, merciless gangsters and high-stakes deals.

Every so often, Mezrich breaks the story with a chapter on how he conducted his own research for the book, upping the atmospherics. Malcolm winds up with $50 million dollars "sitting on a beach with a bottle of champagne". Mezrich tells us so in the second chapter, which leaves the end of the book somewhat anti-climactic — the menacing gangs disappear into the shadows without much explanation, too. But it's a fun read, and an interesting glimpse of the Japanese underworld and financial high life.

Reading The Washingtonienne, you pity the wretched and shallow heroine, Jackie, while wanting to shake her at the same time. She hates her job, opening mail for some senator, and she's regularly sleeping with five guys, though she doesn't seem to enjoy it much. "Jackie, you really need to stop having sex with people who don't care about you," cautions a friend. "Well, it's not as if I care about him, either," she replies.

The men pay her in hard, cold cash and cocaine — but even that doesn't seem to cheer her up. She "falls in love" with one partner because he's the first man she sleeps with who doesn't immediately want to have anal sex with her. She dreams of marrying her oldest partner because he's the one with the most money.

Sex and the City liberation, where are you now? The Washingtonienne has a few amusing lines but is ultimately depressing.

* Ugly Americans, Arrow Books, $27.95
* The Washingtonienne, Bantam Books, $37.95