Liar's Poker Chapter 8 Summary

Liar's Poker Chapter Summary
Liars Poker Chapter 8 Summary 3
Liars Poker Chapter 8 Summary 4
Liar's Poker

Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses. Preface - Chapter 2. Chapter 10 - Epilogue. The guide themes, chapter outlines and character summaries are more detailed than other sites.”. Temple that she is not a liar, and relates her life story, trying hard to be moderate and humble. Temple and Helen talk of learned subjects, and Jane watches them in awe.

Jekyll’s butler Poole visits Utterson one night afterdinner. Deeply agitated, he says only that he believes there hasbeen some “foul play” regarding Dr. Jekyll; he quickly brings Uttersonto his master’s residence. The night is dark and windy, and thestreets are deserted, giving Utterson a premonition of disaster.When he reaches Jekyll’s house, he finds the servants gathered fearfullyin the main hall. Poole brings Utterson to the door of Jekyll’slaboratory and calls inside, saying that Utterson has come for avisit. A strange voice responds, sounding nothing like that of Jekyll;the owner of the voice tells Poole that he can receive no visitors.

Poole and Utterson retreat to the kitchen, where Pooleinsists that the voice they heard emanating from the laboratorydoes not belong to his master. Utterson wonders why the murdererwould remain in the laboratory if he had just killed Jekyll andnot simply flee. Poole describes how the mystery voice has senthim on constant errands to chemists; the man in the laboratory seemsdesperate for some ingredient that no drugstore in London sells.Utterson, still hopeful, asks whether the notes Poole has receivedare in the doctor’s hand, but Poole then reveals that he has seenthe person inside the laboratory, when he came out briefly to searchfor something, and that the man looked nothing like Jekyll. Uttersonsuggests that Jekyll may have some disease that changes his voiceand deforms his features, making them unrecognizable, but Pooledeclares that the person he saw was smaller than his master—andlooked, in fact, like none other than Mr. Hyde.

Hearing Poole’s words, Utterson resolves that he and Poole shouldbreak into the laboratory. He sends two servants around the blockthe laboratory’s other door, the one that Enfield sees Hyde usingat the beginning of the novel. Then, armed with a fireplace pokerand an axe, Utterson and Poole return to the inner door. Uttersoncalls inside, demanding admittance. The voice begs for Uttersonto have mercy and to leave him alone. The lawyer, however, recognizesthe voice as Hyde’s and orders Poole to smash down the door.

Once inside, the men find Hyde’s body lying on the floor,a crushed vial in his hand. He appears to have poisoned himself. Uttersonnotes that Hyde is wearing a suit that belongs to Jekyll and thatis much too large for him. The men search the entire laboratory, aswell as the surgeon’s theater below and the other rooms in the building,but they find neither a trace of Jekyll nor a corpse. They notea large mirror and think it strange to find such an item in a scientificlaboratory. Then, on Jekyll’s business table, they find a large envelopeaddressed to Utterson that contains three items. The first is awill, much like the previous one, except that it replaces Hyde’s namewith Utterson’s. The second is a note to Utterson, with the presentday’s date on it. Based on this piece of evidence, Utterson surmisesthat Jekyll is still alive—and he wonders if Hyde really died bysuicide or if Jekyll killed him. This note instructs Utterson togo home immediately and read the letter that Lanyon gave him earlier. Itadds that if he desires to learn more, Utterson can read the confessionof “Your worthy and unhappy friend, Henry Jekyll.” Utterson takesthe third item from the envelope—a sealed packet—and promises Poolethat he will return that night and send for the police. He thenheads back to his office to read Lanyon’s letter and the contentsof the sealed packet.

Analysis

In the classic detective story, this climactic chapterwould contain the scene in which the detective, having solved thecase, reveals his ingenious solution and fingers the culprit. But,in spite of Utterson’s efforts in investigating the matter of Jekylland Hyde, he has made no progress in solving the mystery. Indeed,were it not for the existence of Lanyon’s letter and Jekyll’s confession,which make up the last two chapters, it seems likely that the truthabout Jekyll and Hyde never would be ascertained.

One cannot blame Utterson for failing to solve the caseof Jekyll and Hyde before reading the letters—even the most skilledprofessional detective could not have deduced the supernatural circumstancessurrounding the doctor and his darker half. Nevertheless, Stevensonuses this chapter to emphasize just how far away from the truthUtterson remains, extending almost to the point of absurdity. Theservants, led by Poole, remain more in touch with the reality of thesituation; they know that something terrible hashappened to their master, and so they forsake their duties and huddletogether out of fright. Upon seeing them gathered in fear, Uttersonreacts with a response characteristic of his all-consuming concernfor propriety and the upkeep of appearances. Instead of lookingfor the cause of the servants’ terror, he is more concerned withmaintaining decorum and social hierarchy. “What, what?” he burstsout. “Are you all here? . . . Very irregular, very unseemly; yourmaster would be far from pleased.”

< The Fifth Risk

Russ Allbery > Reviews

Moneyball >

Publisher:	Penguin
Copyright:	1989
Printing:	1990
ISBN:	0-14-014345-9
Format:	Trade paperback
Pages:	249

Liar's Poker Chapter Summary

I first encountered Michael Lewis through Moneyball, his excellent book on statistics-driven baseballmanagement. It's a great book and an exception to my generaldislike of sports books, but it also left me mentally filing Lewisinto the sports writer category and not that likely to write otherbooks I wanted to read. But then I found an excellent piece hewrote for Portfolio on the current banking crisis, followedby a wonderfully entertaining article for Vanity Fair onthe collapse of the Icelandic banking system. Based on those, I lookedfurther and picked up Liar's Poker, to which the Portfolioarticle is a sort of postscript.

Liar's Poker is about bond trading at Salomon Brothers during thefinancial boom of the 1980s. Lewis, fresh out of the London School ofEconomics, was hired by them in 1985. He became a bond salesman with theLondon office of the company, apparently a fairly successful one, beforeleaving the firm in 1988. Liar's Poker is about half biography,following Lewis's training and career, and half the history of 'modern'bond trading at Salomon Brothers. In pursuit of the latter, Lewis goesback as far as the late 1970s, when John Gutfreund became managingdirector. Salomon Brothers was swallowed by Citigroup in 1998, but notbefore it invented mortgage-backed securities, played a significant rolein junk bonds, and inspired (in part) The Bonfire of the Vanities.

The first thing I noticed about Liar's Poker, the aspect that jumpsout to a current reader, is the degree to which it prefigures both thecurrent financial crisis and some of the elements of Enron's collapse.The historical roots of the current crisis have been covered elsewhere,but Lewis provides more detail and feel for the attitude inside thecompany. The corporate attitude of egotistical intelligence, greed,everything-goes capitalism, and the willingness to manipulate and inventmarkets in pursuit of profit that Lewis portrays bears a remarkableresemblence to accounts of the internal politics and attitudes at Enron.Based on the fallout from the mortgage crisis and the antics on CNBC, Isuspect it remains common on trading floors to this day.

This is not a work of journalist-quality investigation. Both thebiographical aspect and Lewis's colorful storytelling technique workagainst that. Rather, Liar's Poker struck me as a personalexploration of the motives and attitudes behind the trading floor of adominant Wall Street firm, the mindset that it taught its trainees (andthat the trainees brought into the firm), and the way financial feedbackand firm culture enabled and rewarded incredibly antisocial behavior. Itlacks the journalistic integrity and methodical investigative approach ofMcLean & Elkind's exceptional The SmartestGuys in the Room about the collapse of Enron, but it adds an insiderperspective. Lewis tries to stay the observer, but he benefitted hugelyfrom that culture, was caught up in the unreality of it and the obsceneamounts of money flowing through the hands of people like himself withremarkably little training, and came across to me as conflicted about hisrole and involvement. I suspect his personal involvement in the storymakes it less fully accurate, and I suspect some of the anecdotes of beingexaggerated to tell a better story, but it adds an interesting feeling ofexpiation.

As in Moneyball, Lewis is excellent at explaining complex systems.His brief histories here of junk bonds and mortgage-backed securities arewell worth the price of the book. He presents a detailed account of theorigin of mortgage-backed securities in the savings and loan crisisalongside the best explanation I've ever heard of why the invention ofthose securities was a watershed event in financial markets. Untilreading this book, I hadn't understood the scale of money involved, thedifficulties in securitizing mortgages so that they looked liketraditional bonds, or the links with savings and loans. The junk bondexplanations are also valuable, if somewhat less timely and now a moretraditional part of the financial landscape.

Liar's Poker has a tendency to meander, leaving me with a grab-bagimpression. There's a bit of history, a lot of biography, a catalog ofextremely unappealing people and a viciously sophmoric culture, a fewfascinating characters, and a bizarre fantasyland of more money than onecan hope to understand. It's not a book with solutions; it is a book thatwill give one a deep dislike and mistrust for the Wall Street tradingculture and which drives home the ways in which Wall Street firms are noton the side of their supposed clients. I would be suspicious of the sheerugliness of the culture Lewis portrays had not every other episode, suchas Enron, that opened the lid on that culture revealed similar scurryingcockroaches. As is, whether or not individual anecdotes are entirelyaccurate, I suspect that Lewis has captured the cultural mindset all toowell.

This is not a work at the level of The Smartest Guys in the Room oreven Moneyball, but it's an interesting book that filled in somehistorical gaps for me. It's also less dated than one might think. ReadLewis's magazine articles linked above first, but if you like their style,Liar's Poker is worth picking up.

Rating: 7 out of 10