Company: A Book.

As my devoted readers will know, not long ago I expressed interest in something I’ll now describe as the literature of corporate life; I was thinking about salesmanship as discussed in recent fiction. It occurs to me that I could re-read Babbitt, a book I remember enjoying very much when I read it as a student (and I had to read it twice, and liked it both times); I’m sure that Sinclair Lewis has more than one title which would contribute to my thoughts on this subject.

But last week I took a more recent title from the library, a book that I remember ordering for the bookstore, and could have read at the time, but didn’t. It’s entitled Company, by a young man named Max Barry. A paperback of this novel was at the public library in the New Fiction section, and my eye fell on it. I thought, “Well, I could read that,” but I wasn’t really interested, so I moved on… and then I remembered, “Wait: wasn’t I just talking about sales in fiction? I bet this book has something in it for me.” So I trotted back and snatched the bright yellow book from the shelf. Well, ok: the spine is bright yellow. The cover is a sort of bland photo of a young business type, his face obscured by a bright yellow band reading, simply: COMPANY.

One is reminded of the generic BEER that everyone drinks in the movie Repo Man. Which is, now that I think about it, about repo men – the opposite of salesmen. Perhaps I should watch that little gem again, too…

Miss Edith spends a lot of time these days thinking about sales and the different kinds of sales that people do. I don’t want to go into too much detail here because, frankly, it’s a rather boring subject and I don’t want to make anyone uncomfortable in the process of boring everyone else. But let’s just say that sales, in the normal corporate sales sense, seems to require a particular kind of personality. It’s different from retail sales. They’re both deadening sorts of work, but there’s something about retail, I believe, that can, depending on what one’s retailing, that can keep the soul alive. Corporate sales, though… I just don’t know how that kind of work can do anything but eat away at one’s soul.

Max Barry apparently worked at Hewlett Packard for a long time, so presumably he had a long chance to observe corporate sales types in action. I don’t know Barry’s background but I’m going to go out on a limb and say that he was probably in marketing for at least some of his time at H-P. He tackles the psyche of the salesman/saleswoman early in his novel. From page 11 of Company:

On level 14, Elizabeth is falling in love. This is what makes her such a good sales rep, and an emotional basket case: she falls in love with her customers. It is hard to convey just how wretchedly, boot-lickingly draining it is to be a salesperson. Sales is a business of relationships, and you must cultivate customers with tenderness and love, like cabbages in winter, even if the customer is an egomaniacal asshole you want to hit with a shovel. There is something wrong with the kind of person who becomes a sales rep, or if not, there is something wrong after six months.

Earlier in the book, when we meet Elizabeth, she is nutshelled: “Elizabeth is smart, ruthless, and emotionally damaged; that is, she is a sales representative. If Elizabeth’s brain was a person, it would have scars, tattoos, and be missing one eye. If you saw it coming, you could cross the street.”

Max Barry’s book tackles almost every type of person you can imagine coming across in the corporate world with this kind of precision. While the book does get a bit draggy toward the end, the little pieces of sharp skewering are so good it’s worth it. Miss Edith recommends this book, highly, to that select group of people who understand that cubicles and business cards can lead only to hell…