Falling Sideways
A Novel
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
There seems to be no shortage of business at the Tank, a high-profile
firm in Copenhagen. There are meetings to attend, memos to write,
colleagues to undermine. But when the Tank's nefarious CEO announces a
round of downsizing, everyone becomes exponentially more concerned about
... whatever it is they're doing. Not since Joshua Ferris's Then We Came to the End has there been such a savvy satire of contemporary work culture, and the distorting effects it can have on our lives.
Following
these imperiled company men and women out into the autumn days and
nights of Copenhagen, Thomas E. Kennedy traces the ripple effects of the
news at the Tank as it impacts spouses, children, and lovers. Top
executive Frederick Breathwaite is frantically trying to ensure a stable
future for his son, while the boy's greatest fear is that his future
might resemble his father's absurd present. Harald Jaeger is estranged
from his wife and daughters but pursuing desperate passions for other
women (including the Tank's married CFO). And while he's lost in amorous
fantasies, he has managed to catch the CEO's eye-as a possible
replacement for Breathwaite.
Sharp, funny, but remarkably tender, Falling Sideways is the
second book in Kennedy's virtuoso Copenhagen Quartet, and a book that
will continue to build his reputation as one of America's most versatile
literary novelists.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The frustrating second installment to Kennedy's Copenhagen Quartet (after In the Company of Angels) spends a bitter autumn with several employees of the Tank, a downsizing Danish company whose business is a mystery even to some of its executives. Harald Jaeger, the book's most engaging character, is a bewildered womanizer whose villainous ex-wife absurdly accuses him of molesting their young daughters. Frederick Breathwaite, erudite, alcoholic, impotent, and suicidal, is a Tank higher-up, and accordingly gets canned. As part of his settlement, he negotiates a job for his bohemian son, Jes. All the Tank's workers are vulnerable to the axe wielded by CEO Martin Kampman, whose own rebellious son falls in love with the family's au pair and under the spell of Jes, whose supposed sense of humor and charisma don't exist on the page. We get some amusing observations of office culture, some tired riffs on, for instance, American profanity and antismoking rhetoric, and much sex and lust (and unfortunate prose thereof). Kennedy's descriptions of Copenhagen draw a pleasing map in the reader's mind, but his generational conflicts are familiar and his skein of thin story lines seems like a lot of too little.
