(2.5 stars)

This is a fun little story that is extremely character driven. There wasn’t much of a point to the story, but I think the point was that there is no point to office stories. ( )

I keep telling my friends to read this book when they complain about their jobs. It made me laugh and I got a kick out the first person plural narration (which, NERD ALERT, made me think of the Borg).

But this is not a LOLs book, it's a first novel by an ambitious guy with an MFA. It tries to get deep, which I thought made it more interesting than it would've been if it'd just been jokey.

Still the first part, "You don't know what's in my heart," was hilarious. ( )

Here's what I wrote about this read in 2009: "Life in the office during the dot.com bust economic downtown; almost surreal to read in 2009 in the midst of the Great Recession. A lot a pettiness and silliness in that ad agency, and a little humanity as the featured partner declines with breast cancer." ( )

Second reading: I'm feeling that achy-love feeling that comes when you've turned the last page of a really good book. What really struck me this time around was the quality of the writing, how everything is so well said and purposeful and just right. It's something that I notice a lot more as I get older, an author's use of language and style, and I have no tolerance for flabby meandering writing. Reader, this book is sharp and on point. Highly recommend.

First reading: Feels kind of like the movie "Office Space", but better. Seriously.

The book starts off less like a novel and more like a collection of great anecdotes your friend is sharing during happy hour. This was a little unexpected for me, but it only took about a chapter to get into the flow. About halfway through the story structure becomes more linear and plot-focused.

I have to share the following passage because my office just went through the exact same thing with our second floor, and the author totally nailed the feeling:
"[Floor:] Fifty-nine was a ghost town. We needed to gather up the payroll staff still occupying a quarter of that floor and find room for them among the rest of us and close down fifty-nine, seal it off like a contamination site. Odds were we were contractually bound to pay rent on that floor through the year, shelling out cash we didn't have for real estate we didn't need. But who knows - maybe we were keeping those abandoned cubicles and offices in hopes of a turnaround. It wasn't always about ledger work at the corporate level. Sometimes, like with real people, it was about faith, hope, and delusion." ( )

I really struggled to give this book a rating, but I settled on 4 stars because the narrative voice is so unique and intriguing. It is written in first person, but the collective, so that the story is about Us, but never Me. We never actually meet the narrator, but only the group of personalities he works with at a failing ad agency. The timeline is also interesting, because the narrative is not linear, but sort of zigzags back and forth between daily motions and bigger events and interactions, but I actually managed to keep it all straight, although it could have been a muddle. One review on the cover of the book invokes Office Space, and before I even read that, that was in my mind. A cross between Office Space and The Wolf of Wall Street, without all the decadent debauchery of the latter, and shades of a real-life job hunt situation that is going on close to me right now. It took me about halfway into the book to realize that I hadn't met the narrator, and about the same length of time to decide to finish the book, because it really isn't until about that point that anything really happens. The people and the life depicted here are so excruciatingly ordinary that I found myself wondering again and again why I was reading it, since it is sort of a busman's holiday for any reader who has ever had an office job, or really any job where you spend the day with coworkers. But somehow I got sucked in and kept reading to the end, which is a coda that ties up what storylines did emerge in the second half of the book. On the cover, Stephen King calls this book "hilarious," and to that I say that either Mr. King and I read totally different books or we have totally different senses of humour, because nothing about this book was hilarious. I'm not even sure how I feel right now, but definitely not amused. ( )