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Anonymous
Posted July 6, 2004
'Predatory Bender' is a strange hybrid: a literary novel of consumer protection. It is also a closely-observed portrait of the South Bronx and the people who live there, as well as an anti-corporate rant of the type one assumes will resonate, in the wake of protests against the World Trade Organization, Exxon-Mobil and even Predatory Bender's chief target, Citigroup. The novel is unique even before considering its 90-page afterword, 'Predatory Lending: Toxic Credit in the Global Inner City,' which tracks the story's plot as a sort of manifesto in footnotes. The book can be begun from either direction, fiction or non-fiction. Blurring these two is something that most advocates eschew, leaving it to TV Movies-of-the-Week, with their onscreen tag line, 'Based on a True Story.' Several of the plot-lines in Predatory Bender are in a sense free-based from a true story. There's Citigroup chairman Sandy Weill taking an exhibitionist, 'whose-is-bigger' steam bath with his hired intellectual, Robert Rubin. Further down the totem pole, there are recruitment sessions for Citigroup's door-to-door insurance sales unit, Primerica, at which inductees are asked if they want to live like Weill. Most answer 'yes' -- they channel the great man's energy and jot relentlessly positive thoughts in their Daily Planners. It is a depressing picture of America, but one not without basis in fact. The most sympathetic characters in the novel as all, intentionally it seems, people of color. There's Bertha Watkins, who following the death of the Army veteran husband and one of their daughters, raises her three remaining children in a tenement building in the South Bronx, which she tries to liven up with a four post bed bought with a high-cost Citigroup loan, on which Citi jam-packs credit insurance. There's Milagros and Amado Guzman, who refinance their wood-frame Tremont home with CitiFinancial, in order to pay off Amado's hospital bill. Their son returns from the war in Afghanistan shaking his head at having bombed wedding parties because a somewhat tall man was spotted in attendance, from a high-flying Predatory drone aircraft. In the middle, in the gray zone so to speak, is CitiFinancial employee Jack Bender, who rebels against insurance packing (though he knows how to do it); who turns against the company only after he's fired, and lies repeatedly to his ex-wife while soliciting prostitutes and surfing the Internet for multi-ethnic porn. His saving grace is his love for his daughter, his desire to take her away from this sleazy world of strip malls. Whether he succeeds is one of the novel's mysteries, part of the yeast that takes the book beyond the genre of consumer how-to and anti-corporate rant into the realm of, well, art....
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Posted December 3, 2003
'Predatory Bender' by Matthew Lee is a sharp book that aims to expose a sharp practice: the ways in which banks target poor communities with high cost loans, foreclose on people's homes, and trap them in debt. The novel is set in a low income part of New York, the Bronx. A woman gets a loan, not to buy a house but a bed, strangely or appropriately enough. She is sold insurance; all told, she owes over five thousand dollars. The man making the loan, Jack Bender, at first laughs, but soon enough things change for him. His own company, the so-called EmpiGroup, seemingly based on the world's largest bank, turns on him, sicking the police on him. He offers evidence first to a dodgy community activist-type, then to a similarly (but differently) dodgy storefront lawyer, who approaches the attorney general, who is ambitious, and things go from there. The chief executives of Empigroup, including one hired from the Clinton cabinet, are caricatured as they try to put out this unlikely bed-loan fire. But the fire just grows... With this novel, Mr. Lee has defied expectations, at least of this reader. The book is not simplistic; it does not paint all consumers as pure and all lenders as ruthless. Everyone is subject to some satire, including characters we must assume are near or dear to the author. It's a dark comedy, a sort of subprime lending Catch-22, or reminiscent of Mr. Lee's (former) fellow Bronxite, Don DeLillo. Neither analogy quite captures it -- it is truly a unique book, or books -- the afterword, 'Predatory Lending: Toxic Credit in the Global Inner City,' is printed upside down, such that the book can be started from either direction. The afterword is keyed to the novel's 60 chapters; one may wish to jump from one to the other and back, as in the Internet's hypertext mark-up language. By the end of the experience, one knows more about predatory lending and those who suffer, practice and profit from it; one has an insight into how and why government investigations begin and end, so often without bringing about real change, and one may then want, as this reader did, to change the conditions that allows this reverse Robin Hood groove to go on. One has also laughed, repeatedly, as well as groaning and shaking one's head. All in all, not a bad ride, for a paperback novel. We'll be hearing more from Matthew Lee, it's fair to surmise, unless the banks get him first.
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