King of the Mississippi
A Novel
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- USD 7.99
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- USD 7.99
Descripción editorial
A biting, hilarious literary satire of war, business, and contemporary masculinity, set in the cutthroat-but-ridiculous world of management consulting
King of the Mississippi is an incisive, uproarious dissection of contemporary male vanity and delusion, centered around a "war" for dominance of a prestigious Houston consulting firm. On one side of the conflict is Brock Wharton, an old money ex-jock whose delight in telling clients to downsize is matched only by his firm conviction that people like himself deserve to run the world. On the other is Mike Fink, a newly hired wily former soldier trying to ride his veteran status to the top of a corporate world that lionizes "the troops" without truly understanding them. Brock and Mike are mortal enemies on sight, bitterly divided not only by background and class but by diametrically opposed (yet equally delusional) visions of what it means to "be a man." And as their escalating conflict spirals out of control, it will take them all the way from the hidebound boardrooms and gladiatorial football fields of Texas to the vapid and self-serving upper echelon of Silicon Valley, to the corporatized battlefield of Iraq, all the while serving as a ruthlessly funny takedown of the vacuity and empty machismo of corporate life and alpha-male culture in modern America.
Devastatingly witty, unapologetically scathing, and ultimately surprisingly moving, King of the Mississippi marks the arrival of a unique and scintillating new voice in American fiction, one that boldly punctures the myths of American manhood like no one has since the heyday of The Bonfire of the Vanities and American Psycho.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A towering monument to arrogance faces off against a wily underminer in Freedman's precise and pungent satire of the business world (after School Board). Brock Wharton is a successful Houston business consultant and, at least according to him, the smartest guy in the room. He's on partner track at his consultancy when he's assigned to train a new hire, Mike Fink, an earthy ex Special Forces operative who sees Brock as less a mentor than a target. As Fink endlessly capitalizes on his veteran status to win the trust of clients and engages in various forms of professional sabotage, Brock develops his own counterinsurgency (as he dubs it) to get rid of Fink, whose very existence is an affront to Brock's Harvard-burnished values. It's not ruining anything to say that the two end up conspiring together on a far-flung assignment, but the road to their detente is never a forced one. Freedman laces the narrative with acid observations ("Like Islamists, Houstonians shared a fanaticism for knocking down landmark buildings") and fills it with jargon, though the business doublespeak conceit wears thin. Freedman deserves credit for sticking with such a hubristic antihero; his darkly comic skewering of capitalism is all the more potent for it. This is sly, sharp fun.
