What is life really like on Wall Street? Are investment bankers’ lives filled with wild parties, fine dining, and beautiful women? Or do they drudge through 100-hour work weeks with abusive supervisors, tedious paperwork, and an excessive amount of foul language? According to John Rolfe and Peter Troob, the answer to both questions is yes.

 “Monkey Business: Swinging Through the Wall Street Jungle” is the true story of two young men who joined “the hottest firm on Wall Street” in hopes of achieving high-paying, lifelong, prestigious careers. What they got was a two-and-a-half-year trek into the uncharted wilderness of the “Wall Street Jungle.” And that world, as well as this book, is not for the faint-of-heart.
Authors Rolfe and Troob were seduced into joining investment bank Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette (DLJ) while they were still in the process of completing their MBA degrees at Wharton and Harvard business schools, respectively. Through narratives told from the perspectives of both authors in dialogue style, they paint a gruesome picture of life in the “trenches” with their stressed-out, sex-starved, middle-aged colleagues, all intent on drowning their unhappiness with alcohol and women.

According to Rolfe and Troob, parties are a requirement for DLJ employees. Their supervisors expect them to go out nearly every night after work and eat and drink to excess while being as obnoxious as possible in the process:

 “In the weeks leading up to our first holiday blowout, the senior associates schooled us in the essentials of DLJ holiday party tradition. The rules were simple: (1) get stone drunk (2) avoid vomiting on any managing directors, and (3) make every effort to get a banking assistant into bed by the end of the night.”

  What makes this book bearable to read is the fact that it maintains its sense of humor, adolescent as it may be. Rolfe and Troob don’t take themselves or their colleagues too seriously. But while the stories do maintain the reader’s interest, the self-righteous attitude of the authors makes the reader dislike them. They criticize their colleagues, yet they join in the revelry just the same.

 The book’s main weakness is its lack of coherence. The authors’ anecdotes are haphazard and do not really result in any point other than to illustrate their colleagues’ – as well as their own -- flaws. In one particularly crude scene at an office party in a local bar, an extremely drunk banking assistant leans over to vomit on the floor while an extremely drunk investment banker grabs her from behind and begins to simulate sex. In another scene at another office party, a drunk John Rolfe urinates under a table while his clueless supervisors sit across from him. There are scenes even more graphic than these, but in the spirit of good taste I will not repeat them.

The middle of the book departs from the anecdotes and delves into a factual digression about underwriting, pitch books, valuation, comparable multiples analysis and discounted cash flow analysis. After debaucheries like the ones described above, serious information about banking just doesn’t seem to fit.

It is no surprise that by the end of the book, Rolfe and Troob decide they have had enough of the investment banking lifestyle and leave to pursue other interests. The chapter aptly titled “The Epiphany” begins with the following platitude:

 “The dream. Was it worth it? Was big money by thirty the goal, or would we rather enjoy our lives? Could you have both and still be an investment banking associate? You can be rich at thirty, forty, or fifty, but you can’t recapture your youth. You can’t buy time and you can’t buy happiness. Time marches on. The DLJ annual report said ‘Have fun.’ We weren’t.”

 “Monkey Business” certainly lives up to its title: Wall Street is a jungle, as Rolfe and Troob describe it. But it seems that much of the book is simply meant to shock the reader, not to serve any meaningful purpose. The rest of the book is spent teaching about the business of banking and preaching about shattered expectations. Rolfe and Troob had a bad experience on Wall Street, and they are bitter about it. That fact, and not the cliché about surviving the jungle and following your dreams, is what really comes through in this book.

 Kari Lomanno works for Inside Business, a weekly business journal in Virginia.