Have you ever been to a dinner party where everything's great?

The drinks are good, the food's amazing, the conversation's flowing,

but there's one person there who is so obnoxious, so unbelievably grating,

that you just wish you could make them leave.

There's a book I read recently called The Vegan, and it starts out with

exactly that premise. This hedge fund manager called Herschel is throwing a dinner party. He's

actually trying to impress his rich new neighbours, and to make things smoother, he invites along an

old friend. But she turns out to be a complete nightmare.

Here's how the book's author Andrew Lipstein describes what happens. And seeing early on that it's a

mistake, Herschel, it's not much of a spoiler, but he basically spiked her drink with

Zekyll, which is the sleep aid. And that works in getting

her out of their way, and they have a great night. And then soon after he realizes that this may

have had a terrible effect on her. And she is in the hospital with a traumatic brain injury.

Herschel spends the rest of the book finding ways to make up for what he's done. And the big

one is, he becomes vegan. I think we've all been there, right? Like we wake up one morning and we

realized the night before we said something like insensitive or we weren't the person we wanted to

be and we have this lingering sense of guilt so that there's literally nothing we can do with.

And we might end up finding just another way to make up for that. It has nothing to do with

the original action.

I love the vegan because it's funny and smart, and it grapples with ethical questions in a

really sensitive way. On the one hand, Herschel's newfound obsession with animal rights seems

performative.

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