BONDS AWAY!

By John Skow

Here's a work of fiction--no, scratch that, a testament of bitter truth--that answers a question unasked since the dawn of literature: What is a mortgage bond? The answer in Bombardiers (Random House; 319 pages; $22) seems to be: That which the selling of makes your teeth itch. The first sentence of Po Bronson's desperate, funny, booklong rant at bucket-shop marketing of financial chaos neatly pelletizes his entire volume: "It was a filthy profession, but the money was addicting, and one addiction led to another, and they were all going to hell."

What follows is a novel only in the sense that it has a lot of pages not devoted to phone numbers. There is no plot and certainly nothing that could be called character development. Ah, but character disintegration, character vaporized and sucked away by the office air conditioning, that's another matter. Bronson describes a sales floor where twitchy, sweating wretches are flogged back to their cubicles by a demented sales manager when they sprint for the rest rooms. They pluck random, cooked statistics from their Quotrons, bark hopeless lies into speed-dial phones, fill impossible quotas by selling federal Resolution Trust bonds back to the very failed savings and loans into which the government is trying to pump life-giving formaldehyde.

There's Coyote Jack and Sid Geeder the Mortgage King and some guy who flosses his teeth all the time. They're rich, sick, steeped in shame and caffeine, and "in the heat of sale, they needed to keep talking, and they said whatever came to them, as long as it was just color commentary ." So airless is this hive, it is not till near the book's midpoint that we learn that the office action, as distinct from the global flow of byte-driven hysteria, takes place in San Francisco. Some of the brighter salesmen muse about quitting, but to do what? As this amiable tour of the information economy makes clear, the wider world of wives, children, drinking and adultery has entirely ceased to exist.