The Business Fiction Project

I haven't read all that much fiction that is mainly about the business world, although of course much fiction touches on that world. Business fiction can be situated in the world of workers, the world of managers and capitalists, the world of entrepreneurs; there are plenty of possibilities. And although these subjects are not exactly neglected as material -- there is a large academic literature on business themes in fiction -- it is easier to think quickly of novels on many other subjects than it is to think of great business novels.

I looked back over my life-list to see what I had read that might qualify for this project, and there were only nine novels.

William Dean Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham
William Dean Howells, A Hazard of New Fortunes
Christopher Knowlton, The Real World
Louis Auchincloss, Diary of a Yuppie
Walter Kirn, Up in the Air
Sloan Wilson, The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit
Joshua Ferris, Then We Came to the End
Willem Elsschot, Soft Soap
Willem Elsschot, The Leg

The Howells novels I read many years ago, and need to re-read; both are great. (A reinvigorated Howells project is inevitable; he's the American Trollope, my kind of novelist.) The Knowlton (by an author who has not published at book length again) and the Auchincloss (by a celebrated author who is very prolific) are artefacts of the Eighties; my memories of them are a little imprecise. Kirn's Up in the Air is an unusual novel about a "road warrior" consultant obsessed with his frequent flyer miles; I liked it very much. Then We Came to the End, as I've mentioned earlier in the blog, underwhelmed me for such an acclaimed novel. Soft Soap is very impressive, and I'll write more about its interesting short sequel The Leg in an upcoming "Reading Diary."

The real surprise among this group is Sloan Wilson's titularly famous The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, to which my attention was directed by a terrific Malcolm Gladwell essay in The New Yorker a few years back:

http://www.gladwell.com/2004/2004_11_08_a_trauma.html

Wilson reveals himself in this novel as a writer of stature: the prose, characterization, and complex contrapuntal plotting are all excellent. If this is a representative sample of "popular fiction" of that time, I need to read more of it. (The film version with Gregory Peck is less good.)

The business world has generated plenty of interesting work in film and television lately: Mike Judge's wonderfully funny film Office Space; the British and American versions of The Office (neither of which I've watched yet); the closely related, and underrated, Fred Savage sit-com Working; Laurent Cantet's marvelous films Human Resources and Time Out (the latter one of the very best movies of the past decade); the new AMC series Mad Men (happily renewed for a second season).

More about all this moving forward; just laying out the "parameters" of the project here (to use biz-speak).