"A brilliant book. Karim Issar is one of the freshest, funniest heroes I've come across in a long time." -- Ben Fountain, bestselling author of Brief Encounters with Che Guevara
"An innovative and incisive meditation on the wages of corporate greed, the fundamental darkness of its vision lit by the author's great comic intelligence and wit." -- Kathryn Davis, author of The Thin Place, Hell: A Novel, and Versailles
With a fresh and singular voice, Teddy Wayne marks his literary debut with the story of one 26 year old Middle Eastern man's attempt to live the American Dream in New York City. Like the award-winning Netherland and The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Kapitoil provides an absorbing look into American culture and New York finance from an outsider's perspective.
"Sometimes you do not truly observe something until you study it in reverse," writes Karim Issar upon arrival to New York City from Qatar in 1999. Fluent in numbers, logic, and business jargon yet often baffled by human connection, the young financial wizard soon creates a computer program named Kapitoil that predicts oil futures and reaps record profits for his company.
At first an introspective loner adrift in New York's social scenes, he anchors himself to his legendary boss Derek Schrub and Rebecca, a sensitive, disillusioned colleague who may understand him better than he does himself. Her influence, and his father's disapproval of Karim's Americanization, cause him to question the moral implications of Kapitoil, moving him toward a decision that will determine his future, his firm's, and to whom--and where--his loyalties lie.
