Gassy, deadpan first novel, a tour de farce that both reviles and celebrates the pretentious, treacherous, and luxurious world of corporate middle management, revealed here by Fortune magazine’s business columnist. Bing (in reality Gil Schwartz, also an executive for CBS) offers a mostly plotless series of vignettes about a handful of feckless, back-scratching, buzz-talking senior executives at an unnamed, generic New York corporate conglomerate who are boozing, golfing, gorging, and fornicating their way toward “Moby Deal,” a $100 billion multinational merger that just might make their company the world’s biggest business entity. At story’s center is Lloyd, a good-natured, contentedly married, brown-nosing laptop toter who’s not too wise or too foolish to be anything other than he is (which seems mainly to be a translator of the tenuous lip chewings of his boss, Walt, into zingy corporate-speak). We watch as Lloyd and his fellows attend pointless meetings, wallow in overpriced hotel rooms, guzzle top-shelf liquors, and shed no more than a token tear as they fire thousands of loyal employees to “make the numbers” that their shadowy Chicago CEO, Arthur, wants to see. Bing’s uproarious accounts of boardroom drivel and the sharply dressed buffoons that spout it are more than merely dead-on—he shows that such tactics, however silly, are the tools of a trade whose practitioners are always trying to prove to themselves indispensable. Lloyd ducks the vengeful schemes of his coke-sniffing subordinate Ron, parties heartily, takes his family to Disney World, heroically attends a meeting via cell phone from inside a stranded elevator, and ultimately kills Moby Deal when he learns it will wipe out the worthless chums he’s grown to love. A scathingly snide, occasionally grating send-up of American business that’s rendered with expertise, affection, and flashes of satiric brilliance by one who’s lived it. (Author tour)
Pub Date: April 15, 1998
ISBN: 0-517-70349-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1998
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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