"The Vegan": The Logic of the Stomach

On Andrew Lipstein's novel about language and its failures, machine learning and markets, and how to be good.

The Vegan, Andrew Lipstein (2023)

Announcing his latest novel on The Social Media Formerly Known As Twitter, Andrew Lipstein wrote that the book would contain “high finance, moral reckonings, um veganism, language, ZzzQuil, British playwrights, machine learning, original sins, status anxiety, art, circumcision, guilt, greed, and how far we’ll go to be good”. The feat here is not stuffing a book with all these things, though that is in itself impressive; what’s stunning is that these multitudes come together with such elegant coherence. The Vegan is a complex machine that runs smoothly, and watching the cogs turn (yet somehow defying any sense of mechanical lifelessness) is just one of the book’s many joys.

The book’s narrator, Herschel Caine, is like a character out of Succession, if any of them had a soul. Extremely wealthy, married and planning for children, successful in his career, Caine is also acutely aware of his own sense of the Good. It is the refining of this sensibility that …