BOOKS IN BRIEF
Company by Max Barry (Doubleday, 352 pp., $22.95). Poking fun at corporate culture has reached a fever pitch in the past few years: From Dilbert to Office Space to the sitcom The Office (both the British and American versions), entertainers can't seem to get enough of mocking where we work.
Add to this horde Max Barry's new novel Company. Fiefdoms are divided among cubicles, sales staff wreak vengeance upon coworkers for taking extra donuts, a new employee's hiring is hidden in the office supply budget. In other words, it's only slightly more ridiculous than any office you've ever worked in.
The company in Company, Zephyr Holdings has no customers. Its mission statement contains mysterious phrases emphasizing its desire to forge "profitable growth opportunities" and coordinate "a strategic consolidated approach to achieve maximum returns for its stakeholders." Needless to say, no one at Zephyr is quite clear what its purpose is. In his third month at the company, Stephen Jones finally figures out exactly what Zephyr is up to. And here I reach a quandary: I don't want to spoil the surprises that come after page 100. But I can't discuss the novel's major problem without continuing. So here's the choice: The spoiler-free review ends here by my telling you that Company is a good, quick read with some interesting insights into corporate culture that has one glaring flaw.
And to say that the book has a "glaring flaw" is probably an exaggeration; after all, novels are allowed to make arguments. But Barry's insistence that capitalism is morally bankrupt is incredibly distracting.
Jones discovers that Zephyr isn't a real company at all; rather, it's a grand experiment designed to test different management practices in the real world. Those theories are then compiled by Project Alpha (a secret group within the company into which Jones is inducted) into the Omega Management System, a series of books designed to turn executives into more effective managers. His world turned upside down, Jones has qualms about what the company is doing. How can they give people meaningless jobs, and then fire them from those meaningless jobs, as part of an experiment? (I should note that he is not worried about giving people jobs that don't matter, just taking them away.)
The voice of capitalism is that of the beautiful, but heartless, executive-hiding-as-secretary Eve Jantiss. She is incredibly unsympathetic. When Jones worries about the ethical nature of their work, she tells him that "ethics is bulls--t. It's the spin we put on our lives to justify what we do." How did she get this way? She was raised in a socialist household, she complains to Jones, telling him that her "Mom [forbade] my sisters and I to have individual possessions. Everything was everyone's."
Spurred on by Jones, Zephyr's employees eventually revolt, deposing their overlords in senior management and creating a workers' paradise. But after they take over, the employees spend their time not doing their (meaningless) work. Instead, they play hockey in the office. In his frustration, Jones lets everyone in on the secret of Project Alpha, forcing Jantiss to close Zephyr Holdings for good.
Capitalism is portrayed as evil and socialism as inept. But to paraphrase Churchill, the lesson of Company may be that capitalism is the worst economic system, except all the-others that have been tried.
--Sonny Bunch