''Kapitoil'' is a 2010 novel by

Teddy Wayne Teddy Wayne (born 1979) is an American novelist and short story writer whose books include '' The Love Song of Jonny Valentine'' (2013) and ''Loner'' (2016). He is a frequent contributor to ''The New Yorker'', ''McSweeney's'', and many other pub ...

published by

Harper Perennial Harper Perennial is a paperback imprint of the publishing house HarperCollins Publishers. Overview Harper Perennial has divisions located in New York, London, Toronto, and Sydney. The imprint is descended from the Perennial Library imprint foun ...

Summary

In the summary of Michael K. Walonen,

''Kapitoil'' recounts three months in the life of Karim Issar, a young
Qatar Qatar, officially the State of Qatar, is a country in West Asia. It occupies the Geography of Qatar, Qatar Peninsula on the northeastern coast of the Arabian Peninsula in the Middle East; it shares Qatar–Saudi Arabia border, its sole land b ...
ian computer scientist/businessman who has traveled to
Manhattan Manhattan ( ) is the most densely populated and geographically smallest of the Boroughs of New York City, five boroughs of New York City. Coextensive with New York County, Manhattan is the County statistics of the United States#Smallest, larg ...
in October 1999 to work for an investment firm debugging its computer system in anticipation of Y2K. In short order Karim develops a program he names Kapitoil that allows high profit gain through predicting fluctuations in the oil futures market by clandestinely monitoring the language of news reports on the Middle East and using algorithms to anticipate how the perceptions of world events they generate will impact the market. The success of Karim’s program leads him to advance rapidly in his firm while a romantic relationship with a co-worker blossoms, but moral conflict encroaches when he is faced with the choice of selling the intellectual property rights to his boss or disseminating them freely through an academic paper suggesting the applicability of its predictive mechanism to dealing with outbreaks of disease in the developing world. The narrative ends with Karim choosing the latter course and boarding a plane back to Qatar, where he will study biology to help further his epidemiology project and work in the small store owned by his father, with whom he has had a strained relationship for some time.

Issar's liberation from the narrow world-views of

neoliberal Neoliberalism is a political and economic ideology that advocates for free-market capitalism, which became dominant in policy-making from the late 20th century onward. The term has multiple, competing definitions, and is most often used pej ...

finance Finance refers to monetary resources and to the study and Academic discipline, discipline of money, currency, assets and Liability (financial accounting), liabilities. As a subject of study, is a field of Business administration, Business Admin ...

is achieved partly through his reading of ''

The Grapes of Wrath ''The Grapes of Wrath'' is an American realist novel written by John Steinbeck and published in 1939. The book won the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and it was cited prominently when Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize ...

'' and ''

Of Mice and Men ''Of Mice and Men'' is a 1937 novella written by American author John Steinbeck. It describes the experiences of George Milton and Lennie Small, two displaced migrant worker, migrant ranch workers, as they move from place to place in California ...

'' by

John Steinbeck John Ernst Steinbeck ( ; February 27, 1902 – December 20, 1968) was an American writer. He won the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humor and keen social percep ...

.Michael K. Walonen, ''Contemporary World Narrative Fiction and the Spaces of Neoliberalism'' (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), p. 57.

References

2010 American novels Novels set in Manhattan Novels about stock traders HarperCollins books {{2010s-novel-stub