Customer Reviews

Company

5 star:		(31)
4 star:		(29)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

I was in the middle of reading The Kite Runner when this one finally arrrived (I preordered it months ago), but I immediately dropped everything else to read it.

It's got a great plot twist early on, so I can't say too much about the story. It's about a guy who gets a job at a company and realizes soon after he begins that he has no idea what the company does. He begins a quest to understand the enigmatic mission of Zephyr Holdings, and that's when things turn a little strange.

As in his others novels, Max Barry uses over-the-top parody to satirize the corporate world. This one's mainly about general management and office politics, so most everyone will see elements that they recognize. When you're not frightened by how familiar these characters and situations are, you'll be laughing.

For anyone looking to comparison to his other novels: I think it's better than Jennifer Governement, but probably not quite as good as Syrup. It shares their theme of corporate satire but with more focus on general management.

It's a quick read and a lot of fun, and I have a feeling it'll be one that I think about for a long time in the future.

I wanted to like this book, just like I wanted to like Jennifer Government but ultimately it fails and for the same reasons. There's just no depth here. Maybe I shouldn't look for any, just accept it as light-hearted satire. Still, the entire story line feels contrived, existing only to point out truths that we all know anyway: big corporations don't care about their employees. Maybe if just one senior manager was given a small amount of depth, rising above the expensive suit-wearing, golf-playing, Porsche-driving cold-hearted power grabber, the book would have been more memorable. Another reviewer compared this type of corporate satire to the movie "Office Space" and to the TV series "The Office." The reason "The Office" (US version) is so entertaining is that the characters are well-developed and likable. The boss, while giving the outward appearance of the crude, boorish status-seeker, is also genuinely concerned about his employees and strives to be well-liked. In Max Barry's story, we don't get to know any of the characters enough to care about them.

And I have to agree with what other reviewers here have pointed out, that use of the word "sacked" instead of "fired" is bizarre for a story that takes place in Seattle. It also seemed strange for the setting to be Seattle when no features of the city are incorporated into the story. It would have been better not to mention the city and keep the story generic.

I think Max Barry has a lot of skill as a writer, enough to keep my interest despite the flaws. I wish that he, like Chuck Palahniuk, would put his talents to better use.

Max Barry is the literary equivalent of Dilbert creator Scott Adams. Starting with Syrup, Barry's novels are both humorous and ruthless in their send-ups of the corporate world, satires that juggle biting wit with suspense. With Company, Barry skewers companies that reorganize with a regularity that rivals Old Faithful. Protagonist Jones is a newly hired sales assistant at Zephyr Holdings, a company whose employees are not exactly sure what the company does, although all are sure that the best way to survive is not to question the orders coming from Senior Management. The Training Sales Department, where Jones works, is embroiled in controversy because one of the reps did not get his morning donut, and there's talk of sabotage. When top-performing Wendell is fired for being "involved in some irregularities concerning morning snacks" and for having commissions that the unit wants to use for its own solvency, the reps realize that the company has begun to punish good results. The panic that ensues has sales reps scrambling to sabotage their own accounts so they can keep their jobs.

In Barry's hands, the destruction of a company has never been so tongue-in-cheek. Here, a series of forwarded calls lead to the crash of the entire computer network, and, because someone must be blamed, the entire tech staff is ousted. Without a viable computer network, employees can't work, although, after the initial panic subsides, they are all too happy to pretend to be working without actually accomplishing anything. Mini-dramas erupt like pimples. As friends disappear from their cubicles, abruptly escorted off the premises by security, people willingly sever all ties with them. Conclusions, often based on nonsense, are whispered. In the midst of all this is Jones: fresh-faced, idealistic, ethical, and determined to do a good job despite the advice he receives from his co-workers.

Barry's strength has always been in his absurdist touch, with individual scenes meaning much more than the characters that propel them, and Company does not divert from this winning formula. This novel's unrelenting mockery of American business practices will have readers alternately smiling and grimacing, especially if they have had even a small glimpse into today's corporate America.

Company is one of the best recent novels I've read. It reads like an episode of "The Office" co-written by George Orwell and Kurt Vonnegut--a lightning-fast read with equal doses of humor, thrills, and even a bit of skin-crawling creepiness.

At the risk of dropping a few spoilers, Company is the story of Stephen Jones, a recent college grad who is accepted to a sales assistant position at Zephyr Holdings, a Seattle-based company. There he meets his coworkers--among them the hard-edged Elizabeth, sympathetic loser Freddy, and Roger, the self-absorbed idiot. After a few weeks on the job, Jones realizes that he has no idea what Zephyr does or who its customers really are. He decides to find out, and the answers he finds propel the story from the mundane to the surreal.

Barry skilfully interweaves several parallel storys--Freddy's crush on the unattainable receptionist Eve, Elizabeth's coping with an unexpected pregnancy, the goings-on of Senior Management and a secret organization within the company itself, and, most hilariously, Roger's dogged pursuit of the One Who Stole His Donut.

I bought Company on a whim, largely because I had read Barry's novel Jennifer Government a few years ago. While Jennifer Government was just as hilarious and thought-provoking as Company, Company is all-around better. It's got the same blistering pace, intricate plotting, and hilarious but recognizable characters, but it's much more streamlined and its barbs never fail to provoke laughs at the expense of the corporate world.

Barry is obviously a brilliant satirist, but it's equally amazing to me how much he makes you feel for his characters, given his brisk, spare prose style. By the end of the novel I felt as though I were personally involved in the struggles of Jones, Freddy, and the rest.

Company is a fast-paced, fun, and hugely entertaining novel well worth anyone's time. Highly recommended.

Max Barry has written a very funny and fast-paced novel about working in the corporate world. The story begins in the all too familiar office environment, then catapults into a rollicking adventure of greed, jealousy, lust, and control. As in Jennifer Government, Max builds a strong cast of characters then shifts back and forth between them in a fun and exhilarating style. However, the writing of Company is tighter and more refined. Max's descriptions are quick and snappy. His dialogue shows an excellent ear for quickly communicating the flavor of his characters.

As anyone knows who has worked in a large corporation, there is no institution in the world easier to satirize. Mission statements, employee handbooks, personnel policies, senior management directives, meetings and committees, performance reviews, office politics, office romances, climbing the ladder, jockeying for offices - it's almost too easy. The best satires play it straight, as the all-consuming, life and death struggle its participants take it to be --Dilbert, Steve Carell's THE OFFICE television series, the movie OFFICE SPACE, and my personal favorite, the Kornbluth brothers' little known and underrated HAIKU TUNNEL.

Into this group comes Max Barry's entry, COMPANY. Young and handsome Stephen Jones walks into Zephyr Corporation for his first day of work as a member of the Training Sales group. Jones, as he is called, has no idea what Zephyr does, but he believes it has something to do with selling management training programs. The first strange thing Jones notices is the elevator buttons: the highest floor of the building, marked CEO, is Floor 1 - the higher the floor number, the lower the actual floor and the lower the employee is on the corporate totem pole. As he emerges onto Training Sales's 14th Floor space (shared with Infrastructure Management), he discovers that Sales Reps and their assistants are separated by a high divider dubbed the Berlin Partition. That same morning, the office donut cart makes its usual rounds but ends up one donut short, depriving Training Sales Rep Roger Jefferson of his morning snack and setting in motion a vindictive hunt for the perpetrator that rivals Captain Queeg's infamous, "Who ate the strawberries?" in THE CAINE MUTINY.

All of this sets up COMPANY as a breezy satire of corporate life, until Mr. Barry makes a sharp left into the Twilight Zone. Too wet behind the ears to know better, Jones begins exploring and makes a startling discovery about Floor 1, the top floor that reputedly houses Zephyr's CEO. He learns to his surprise who the real CEO is, and he gets another surprise when he sets foot on the mysterious (and missing) Floor 13. From that point on, the book takes on a completely new tone, equally satirical but increasingly sarcastic and bitter as the truth about Zephyr and its employees becomes clear. Jones is co-opted (or perhaps sells his soul) to participate in the real Zephyr, both for the money and the chance to pursue the gorgeous (and already soulless) Eve Jantiss. In the end, however, Jones regains at least some of his own moral grounding and finds a way to make the truth known.

Max Barry's choice of story lines turns a funny if improbable cast of characters (a secretary who moons over Jones and records everything he does on her computer, or a vertically-challenged, Napoleonic female boss named Sydney who could only be played in the movie version by Linda Hunt) into a somewhat bizarre tale of corporate social engineering turned a bit grisly, like watching a child pull the wings off a fly and then fry it in the sun with a magnifying glass. A cast of bumbling but endearing corporate apparatchiks are joined halfway in by a group of business experts who, under the right conditions, would have been at home in Joseph Mengele's laboratory, experimenting on prisoners.

Yet throughout these twists and turns, Mr. Barry manages to keep skewering corporate life, poking fun at everything from Six Sigma programs and reorganizations to corporate gyms and the sheer silliness of internal cost allocation formulas that lead managers to act against the company's own best interests. Consider a taste, from two short excerpts: "Co-workers are competitors. Roger told me the truth: there's no I in team, but there's no U, either!" and "He [Jones] is looking for something called The Omega Management System, which is the latest management fad in a tradition stretching back through Six Sigma and Total Quality Management to the practice of bleeding sick patients and investing in tulips." Take a break from computer Solitaire and read Max Barry's COMPANY. You'll find 336 pages worth of little nuggets to chuckle over and share with the person in the cubicle next to yours.

I was expecting this book to be basically a bunch of Dilbert jokes in prose form, good for passing the time but little more. I was pleasantly surprised, however, that after a couple of chapters of office humor, an actual plot kicked in. I wouldn't call Company a masterpiece, but it's a work of genuine depth and satire, with a main character that's more than a cardboard cutout. Plus there are indeed some laugh-out-loud jokes. Very much worth reading.

Well, I have read quite a few of the advertising/bussiness books in my time, and this is one of the best. It's just a lot of fun, amd I am not easily entertained, but I found myself laughing at least ten times during the course of the book. Given the cynic I am, this one gets a ten thumbs up, which is the best I can do anyway, for any book.Mind you, I am not one of those people who read only bussiness books, on the contraire, I read everything, but this one is a great analysis of the world we live in and the greed which dictates people to behave in the ways they were not born into.

Max Barry gives a fanstastic view of the modern-day corporation in this book, at least for the first 90 pages of the novel. We follow Jones, the main character, and corporate new hire in his first job. The corporate stereotypes are a little over the top...but done quite well and are often hilarious. References to "Six Sigma," and "Total Market Driven Quality" are actually spot on! I have encountered the very same corporate buzzwords while working for a real-life Fortune 500 company.

Then is a twist that Barry inserts in the story that changes things--significantly. I won't elaborate here as that would make for a spoiler.

Finally, there are a couple of characters that have a...very unlikely relationship that is a bit hard to believe. Also the overall story is a humorous one and not to be taken as a serious critique of modern day business.

Overall, this is a good read for some quick and light entertainment!

Picture your typical company and all it's ridiculous bureaucracy, then take it to almost Dilbert levels - but not that far - where it's still somewhat believable. Throw in a twist in the company history, and you've got Max Barry's company. A funny read along the sames lines of his Jennifer Government and Syrup. I love Max's style because it reads so easily and quick, you can almost sit down and read it straight through without feeling like you've wasted any time at all.