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...