4 stars
“I’m telling you this because the greatest sin is to love somebody and not to tell your love. If you stay silent, they don’t know, when they walk down the street or into a room full of strangers, that they are loved. You are loved, and that can never be taken from you. It’s not much. It’s all I have. Maybe it’s enough.”
“The Fall of Princes” is a beautifully heart-breaking tale of young men in the 1980s, who could make it all and lose it all in the same day — or the same hour. Following the life of Rooney with a confusingly non-linear plot, “The Fall of Princes” shows the rise and fall of many men like Rooney, working at The Firm, making millions and losing millions and spending it in millions of ways before sunset every day.
Rooney was an artist, but a terrible artist, so he took his misguided life to Wall Street instead, where he won a poker game and scored a job as a banker at The Firm. He tells the story of his first year, working 20-hour days for no pay at all, always taking a black town car to work because a cab wouldn’t be appropriate, living in a rat- and roach-infested apartment.
He tells stories of the drugs — he specifies that cocaine was the drug of choice because heroin was beneath him — and the women and the men and the drinking. He works every day knowing the goal for men like him is 40 or 40 — retire by the age of 40, or by the time you’ve made $40 million. He marries a woman he has loved from the minute he saw her, but it’s evident that he never learned how to love, and the women he meets have never been taught how to accept love.
He is living the life, but all the while, the fact that the world as he knows it will soon come to the end is hanging over his — and your — head.
You know it’s coming. You wait for it, because “The Fall of Princes” starts with Rooney getting fired. It’s just a matter of how it happens.
Rooney is a fascinating character at his peak, and also at his lowest. He is handsome, perfectly built, charming, careless and above all a huge success. He drinks too much, takes too many drugs and sleeps with too many women. But he also yearns to be loved. He is deathly afraid of his life catching up with him; he is even more afraid of being diagnosed with AIDS.
“Salvation is not an easy thing, when the sex is so available, and the lines are chopped out on the table, and you know in your heart that whatever happens, you are lost beyond any penance, any redemption.”
This book isn’t fun; it isn’t romantic, or mysterious, or sad. It won’t make you laugh, and it probably won’t make you cry. It’s just the story of a beautiful man who meets his ultimate downfall and has to learn to live with it.
And when you turn the last page and close the cover, you’re not entirely sure if he ever does.
Disclaimer: Advanced copies were sent through Algonquin Books for reviewing purposes. Neither The Daily Tar Heel nor the writer was compensated for this review.
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