KING OF THE MISSISSIPPI

Two alphas battle to be top dog at a global consultancy in this amusing satire on business, ambition, and entitlement.

Brock Wharton, at 33, reckons he has logged “a lifetime of doing everything right.” Quarterback at the University of Texas, married money, Harvard Business School, and on the fast track to becoming managing director of Houston-based Cambridge Consulting Group. But while interviewing new hires, he meets his nemesis, Mike Fink, who seems comfortable being all wrong for CCG. Weak GPA at Tulane, majored in English literature, and sartorially unsplendid: “Navy double-breasted suit he wore as if he were a redneck admiral at a regatta that Wharton would never enter.” But Fink’s resume includes serving as a Green Beret in the Middle East. So while Wharton thinks of the military as “the last stop for the talentless,” CCG’s managing director feels that “in our post 9/11 world, these heroes are a lot more real to clients than another fresh-faced MBA.” Wharton soon realizes Fink is no hick. During a session with client Dr. Pepper, Wharton spouts CCG’s usual mix of jargon, arrogance, and newish ideas. The wily Fink undermines his slideshow and charms the CEO with a paean to corporate tradition. Freedman (School Board, 2014), a former Green Beret himself, uses Fink to skewer the style and substance of consultancies, Houston’s moneyed class, and male egos in general—the novel’s women barely rise above cliché. The scattershot satire can be rough or forced, but it has a compelling energy, like Rodney Dangerfield’s shtick. Freedman’s debut was a broadly comic look at business interests in Houston’s politics as a charismatic teen vies with an oil executive for a school board seat. Maybe there’s another city portrait in the works, something akin to William Kennedy’s Albany novels.

A solid entertainment from a writer of considerable talent and promise.