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Summary
Summary
Ben Cheever's hilarious and profound odyssey through the want-ad world.
In 1995, America was in the throes of downsizing-fever. Many thousands then, as now, were losing their jobs to the corporate demand of more money for the top, by tightening the belt below. Unable to sell his latest novel, Ben Cheever started to think about what employment opportunities were out there. Mustering his courage, he skimmed the want-ads, made some phone calls, went to interviews, and ended up as everything from a security guard to a computer salesman.
Rejected by Brooks Brothers, accepted as a sandwich maker, successful as a car salesman, Cheever brilliantly chronicles life on the other side of the counter. As we see him confront his own demons about what a particular job means to him, we are compelled to consider how our egos are affected by not only what we do, but how we do it. It is through Ben's experiences that we begin to think about our approach to our own jobs and to confront our fears about what we would do if we didn't have them.
Author Notes
Benjamin Hale Cheever has been a reporter for daily newspapers and an editor at Reader's Digest. He is the author of the acclaimed novels The Plagiarist, The Partisan, and Famous After Death, and the editor of The Letters of John Cheever. He has taught at Bennington College and The New School for Social Research.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Where Barbara Ehrenreich surveyed the low-wage workplace with righteous indignation in Nickel and Dimed, novelist Cheever (Famous After Death) recounts his entry-level service jobs with rueful humor. His economic security (thanks to his wife) allows him to write about ventures that otherwise would be shrouded in shame, he says, leaving him with "bragging rights as a failure," since his novels haven't sold. Not everyone will buy that posture, but Cheever manages to combine empathy and edginess in his episodic chapters. As a security guard, he follows instructions to the letter, calling the cops to report a suspicious garbage truck. On the selling floor at CompUSA, he concludes that customers often just wanted to be listened to. At the more Darwinian electronics store Nobody Beats the Wiz, he finds the job's "moral unpleasantness" always pushing that extra insurance compounded by physical privation, as employees must ask permission to use the toilet. Versions of the best chapters have already appeared in print. At the high-volume, high-quality Cos! Sandwich Bar in Manhattan as reported in Gourmet magazine Cheever is known as "Slow G," short for "Slow Grandpa." At Borders Books & Music as he recounted in the New York Times Book Review he writes, "My enthusiasm seemed strangely out of place, and actually alarmed many of the customers." At the Auto Mall as told in the New Yorker he learns, "When you come here, you'll be selling Ben Cheever first." He likes the work, despite the inevitable deception, suggesting that the semi-faux charm of car salesmen is much like that wielded in other social circles. "I've grown to respect the people on the other side of the counter," concludes Cheever, declaring that there is camaraderie and decency in even humble jobs. (Oct.) ~ Forecast: Though more of a meditation than a manifesto, this book should be a natural for talk show and other discussions. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Putting down his pen and taking a series of jobs in the tag end of the service economy, novelist Cheever (Famous After Death, 1999, etc.) finds a host of sad and funny stories. From the outset, the author makes it clear that his economic survival was never at stake; his wife, New York Times critic Janet Maslin, made (and makes) a good income. But he too wanted to earn a living and have a place to go in the morning; at the time (1995), his novels were selling poorly and his latest manuscript was not exactly being celebrated. So he wrote a proposal for a nonfiction book about downsizing while working at unskilled jobs-the only ones open to a writer with zero real-world qualifications. All of the work Cheever found incarnated the downward mobility that clutches at the belly of the white-collar salaryman: deli worker, security guard, Santa Claus, car dealer. Many of his fellow employees were people who had been fired, dusted themselves off, and climbed poor and vulnerable into the ring of the service sector. Although he brings a healthy dose of humor to his chronicle of job-hunting and job-holding, Cheever nonetheless offers a morality tale as impassioned as Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickle and Dimed (p. 475). It comes as no surprise that he finds lots of nobility in the service ranks, plenty of grace under fire, unexpected artistry, and a measure of rage at CEO salaries; it's also expected that the worker will be given the shabbiest of treatment in the service economy's dystopia. What is surprising, and galling, is the everyday humiliation Cheever experiences at the hands of the customer. The boss may be slime, but on the other side of the counter likely stands someone who doesn't even recognize your existence. An education in empathy as well as a reality check. Author tour
Library Journal Review
You've heard the moral of Cheever's tale before: never shop retail. Actually, that's only a by-the-by message of this quick-reading riff on working life in the malls of America, conceived when this boomer writer living in suburban New York comfort in the mid-1990s, rather acutely conscious of being the less-famous writing child of a celebrated practitioner of fiction had the idea that he could sell extended journalism after failing to sell the manuscript of his third novel. So off he went to work at a series of jobs he never really needed, as a guard for a nationally known security firm, salesman for a chain computer store (Apple to the discerning only), sandwichmaker at a Gourmet-approved franchised outfit, clerk at a Borders bookstore (librarians are right to snort), appliance flogger at a discount giant (discount, heck!), and, finally and most sadly, as a wannabe Toyota jockey peddling Oldsmobiles. Despite the smug tone he drops his medium-intellectual celebrity wife's name so much that she will probably regret her gig as a film critic and a constantly pushed irony button that sometimes edges over into outright class snobbery, this is a very funny and informative look at downward mobility just prior to the dot-com prosperity that's already nostalgia fodder. Highly recommended for academic and public libraries. Scott H. Silverman, Bryn Mawr Coll. Lib., PA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
Preface |
Section 1 The Framework Santa and the Underemployed Burns Security |
Bad Cop Brooks Brothers |
My Mother Tells Me I Went to the Wrong College |
Section 2 Birth of a Salesman CompUSA: 'Drugs are okay?' CompUSA: 'People who have money are always assholes.' Modeling |
A Very Handsome Man Nobody Beats the Wiz: 'What people fear more than death?' Nobody Beats the Wiz: Easter Sunday Dean Witter |
The Happy Ending Halloween Town and Telemarketing |
A Large Family |
Section 3 Shelf Life Cosi Sandwich Bar: Slow G Borders Books and Music |
'The way the other writer did.' Acme |
The Fastest-growing Company in the Country |
'We eliminate the middle man.' |
Section 4 Big Game The Auto Mall |
Wanting to Sell Toyotas The Auto Mall |
'Benny, here, done phenomenal!' |
Epilogue |
Acknowledgments |