Customer Reviews

The Cost of Living

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David Dorsey's first book was 1994's "The Force," an astonishingly rich and detailed portrait of the lives of a Xerox sales team in Cleveland. With "The Cost of Living," he shifts to fiction, with more conventional results, despite beginning his novel, pretentiously, with a list of "dramatis personae."

Dorsey introduces us to Rochester, N.Y.'s Richard Cahill, "a midlevel managerial type in a mid-size advertising agency, trying to provide for himself and his family, feeling the weight of it get heavier every year." Cahill faces several crisis points: His wife may or may not be having an affair with her work partner; a close co-worker may or may not be covering up for a client's embezzlement; Cahill and his financially strapped family are considering a move to a larger house. When he winds up in the middle of a McDonald's robbery, he unthinkingly shouts at the holdup men-and his life changes. "When I look back it now, I realize the moment I shouted that kid's street name was the beginning of everything that has happened in my life since then," he tells us. What happens is that he becomes inextricably entangled in a vaguely defined underworld of drugs and money, with some sex and basketball thrown into the mix. The gang members, waxing philosophic and inauthentically profanity-free, aren't particularly convincing, but Cahill is. It's unusual in fiction-if hardly in life-to meet "a suit" who doesn't dream of being a star photographer or artist or musician, and Cahill's ambitions are refreshingly limited. "It bored me to describe the work, let alone describe it," he tells us, but "I enjoyed doing a good job, when that was possible, even though the work itself meant almost nothing to me. It wasn't a calling or even a fulfilling vocation, so much as a game you played to win."

Dorsey is best in the most mundane situations; Cahill's work dilemmas, complete with office politics, salary disputes and ethical questions, make for stronger scenes than the startling white-guy-goes-native material, which never q! uite comes together.

I loved David Dorsey's "The Force", particularly for its vivid and
sympathetic chrarcterization of the Xerox sales reps he observed at
work. So I was delighted to see a novel by Dorsey... until I opened it
to see a "dramatis personae" list. For fewer than 20 characters? In a
relatively short book? What -- was I going to have trouble keeping them
straight? Unfortunately, yes. Dorsey's ad agency characters all seem to
have the same urbane, jokey tone, and his urban black living-on-the-edge
characters are even more puzzling, lapsing in and out of Ebonics like
bad actors (or an author who isn't sure if it's racist or realist) and
being overly based in stereotype (the basketball-playing gang-banger,
the voluptuous caramel beauty). Mr. Dorsey is an EXTREMELY skillful
non-fiction writer. I would love to see what he'd do with a real-life
scenario involving a Euro-American who works in a predominantly
African-American company. But this book fails like crazy. If this is
your first

Wes, a character given only a tiny role by Dorsey, is easily the most fascinating and engaging character in the book, and arguably in the literature of the 20th century. Forget Cahill. Bring back Wes!

If you want to do yourself a real favor, get a copy of David Dorsey's new book, "The Cost of Living" (Viking - August 1997) It is an awesome novel and shows a whole bunch of folks wrapped up and pushed around by the mystery of their "feelings", "emotions" and interesting behavior. The story is great, his prose riviting, his discriptions vivid, and metaphors stupendous. You will only think this is bias until you read the first chapter