A compulsively readable satire of modern corporate culture.
The petty trials and supernatural tribulations of a public relations firm are explored through its Slack conversations in this debut novel.
Gerald, a mediocre employee of an unnamed PR firm, is stuck inside his company’s Slack channel. He doesn't know how his consciousness became trapped inside the business communication app, and he struggles to explain to his colleagues how he’s “just kinda, in here,” which he describes as “pretty existentially terrifying.”Gerald’s co-workers barely register his predicament, however; they believe he's merely engaging in an elaborate bit to take advantage of the firm’s new work-from-home policy. Meanwhile, Gerald frantically solicits help from Slackbot, the app’s troubleshooting AI, who initially only responds with preprogrammed messages like, “I can help by answering simple questions about how Slack works. I’m just a bot, though!” Things get interesting when Gerald convinces his co-worker Pradeep to check on his absent body, and even more so when Slackbot discovers how to “help” Gerald. Kasulke adopts the epistolary format by restricting the action to Slack, composing his novel out of message threads titled by nickname (“#nyc-office”) or the list of participants (“Nikki, Pradeep, Louis C”). Most of the conversations read incredibly quickly, even before the characters are sufficiently differentiated by typing style. Kasulke uses the line breaks and repetition of digital communication to stitch poetry out of textspeak, business lingo, adaptive chatbot phrases, and emojis—the latter represented by frustratingly clunky colon-bracketed text (“:thumbsup:”). Subplots about a PR catastrophe at a dog food company, an office hookup, and an employee haunted by mysterious “howling” offer varyingly interesting sendups of business life. As Gerald dissociates further from reality in favor of endless cyberspace, he laments: “We’re not made to absorb this much human information at once.”
A compulsively readable satire of modern corporate culture.Pub Date: Aug. 31, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-385-54722-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2021
SEEN & HEARD
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
I Who Have Never Known Men ($22.00; May 1997; 224 pp.; 1-888363-43-6): In this futuristic fantasy (which is immediately reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale), the nameless narrator passes from her adolescent captivity among women who are kept in underground cages following some unspecified global catastrophe, to a life as, apparently, the last woman on earth. The material is stretched thin, but Harpman's eye for detail and command of tone (effectively translated from the French original) give powerful credibility to her portrayal of a human tabula rasa gradually acquiring a fragmentary comprehension of the phenomena of life and loving, and a moving plangency to her muted cri de coeur (``I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct'').
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-888363-43-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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