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Office Politics
by
Wilfrid Sheed
general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author
| Title: | Office Politics |
| Author: | Wilfrid Sheed |
| Genre: | Novel |
| Written: | 1966 |
| Length: | 305 pages |
| Availability: | Office Politics - US |
| Office Politics - UK | |
| Office Politics - Canada | |
| from: Bookshop.org (US) |
- With a Foreword by Gerald Howard
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Our Assessment:
B+ : robust and well-crafted
See our review for fuller assessment.
| Source | Rating | Date | Reviewer |
|---|---|---|---|
| Harper's | . | 9/2024 | Dan Piepenbring |
| Hudson Review | B- | Winter/1966-7 | R.G.Davis |
| The NY Times | A | 12/9/1966 | E.Fremont-Smith |
| The NY Times Book Rev. | A | 11/9/1966 | P.Albert Duhamel |
| Sunday Times | . | 12/2/1967 | Frederic Raphael |
| Time | . | 16/9/1966 | . |
| The Washington Post | A | 20/6/2005 | Jonathan Yardley |
Review Consensus:
Not quite a consensus, but most very impressed
From the Reviews:
- "Twining edits a small literary magazine, so he can’t be caught unawares; like all editors in chief, he presides over a subtle, daily psychodrama that consumes his entire staff. This is what Office Politics is about: the ironies of jockeying for influence at an uninfluential periodical. (...) The jokes in Office Politics are still funny, and its weariness still resounds, one subordinate’s sigh at a time, within the 501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations that today produce our most important, least-read magazines. Sheed’s novel has warmth, too, and plenty of wisdom about finding meaning in life and how to face middle age among moribund institutions." - Dan Piepenbring, Harper's
- "Watching the moves and maneuverings is fun, but gets us nowhere. We look through George like a pane of glass, with his predictable sympathies and uncertainties cleverly but all too carefully explained to us. Office Politics is a fine example of graceful, knowledgeable craftsmanship, close to the reader's professional interests -- we all eat lunches, have colleagues, are oppressed by their lesser traits, usually work confined in too small space -- but in the terms I have been setting forth, it offers nothing novelistically because it demands nothing, either of reader or writer." - Robert Gorham Davis, Hudson Review
- "Mr. Sheed is as much interested in how his characters endure suffering as in the precise symptoms of their suffering. He pokes gleeful fun at them, yet his manner is respectful, modest and polite, almost decorous, almost apologetic. (...) Office Politics is an expert work, and a gasser, too." - Eliot Fremont-Smith, The New York Times
- "Classical in structure and style, this, his best work, realizes its comic intention with grace and clarity. (...) This is a fine work indeed, by a virtuoso of the comic whop never hits below the belt and never misses his mark. (...) Adept as all his characters are at translating their own desires into what they want others to believe, Mr. Sheed is an even better translator." - P.Albert Duhamel, The New York Times Book Review
- "Mr Sheed (...) realises that what makes a novel valuable is not the expensiveness of its ambience or the opportunities for omnipotence-fantasies which it affords its readers, but the imaginative intuition and moral urgency of its author. (...) Why Mr Sheed elects to trawl in quite so shallow a pool remains puzzling, despite the interesting specimens he dredges up. Nevertheless, he contrivers to isolate every ambitious twitch and every neurotic nibble with an accurate and illuminating callousness which should shame all those who race into deep water armed only with the blunt harpoon of a defective imagination." - Frederic Raphael, Sunday Times
- "Sheed's muted irony can make the most puerile antagonisms fascinating. The least puerile antagonist of all is also Sheed's most persuasive character: Gilbert Twining is an etched-in-elegance study of sweet British unreasonableness." - Time
- "(T)he best of Sheed's novels and one that remains uncommonly fresh after all these years. (...) Sheed is one of the lamentably few American writers who understand that the office is at least as much home for many of us as home itself, as a result of which the tiny little staff of literary/journalistic hacks at the Outsider becomes a metaphor -- a wholly convincing one -- for any office anywhere, maybe even yours. Sheed can be a merciless satirist, and no one in Office Politics is let off the hook. If these people strike you as buffoons, well, mostly you're right. Yet it's a measure of the depth and complexity of Sheed's vision that they are also very human and, in their odd fashion, very sympathetic. (...) In fact, as the novel winds its course, Twining emerges as one of the most complex, elusive and interesting characters of postwar American fiction." - Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post
Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.
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The complete review's Review:
The New York office in question here is that of The Outsider, a fifteen-year-old magazine appearing biweekly, run for the past seven years by imported and very English editor, Gilbert Twining, whose imprint on every aspect of the magazine is pronounced (and so The Outsider is: "almost as cool and amused as Twining himself" -- and his wife sees: "Gilbert in every line, especially the ones with semicolons").
If not exactly a shoestring operation, it's still a small one, counting 21,000 subscribers (though: "it used to be 27,000"); a bit long in the tooth, it's perhaps not quite keeping up with the times (the heady sixties, after all) -- but then: "No one expected anything fresh and exciting from The Outsider" -- and so it has: "a reputation that shrank a little every time a subscriber died".
Put more bluntly at one point: "Nobody read The Outsider now, nobody but a few dried-up dilettantes and chess-puzzle-fanciers".
There are several old hands at the magazine, including editor Brian Fine, who had hoped to take over when the magazine's founder resigned, only to lose out to the English import; Fritz Tyler; Olga Marplate -- constantly on the look-out for new office space, or at least trying to spruce up the one they're in; Philo Sonnabend, in charge of advertising (and not very good at it); there's also a theater column -- "which was oddly enough considered one of the best in America" -- written by burnt-out Wally Funk ("Wally had actually been quite a good critic in his day, with enough native intensity to last about two years -- after which most critics should be shot anyway"), with magazine-benefactress ("the magazine's backer-in-chief, owner of one third of its largely worthless shares") and theater-enthusiast Harriet Wadsworth angling for the drama-critic spot herself.
The new kid in the office is George Wren, who ridiculously had given up a (considerably) better-paying position at CBS to pursue his literary dreams at The Outsider.
(He also writes poetry.)
Unsurprisingly, George's illusions are soon shattered.
For all the people working on the magazine, The Outsider is: nevertheless "basically a one-man show" -- all Twining.
Personality matters a lot -- not only in shaping the magazine itself but, as he understands:
The staff got tiny salaries as it was, and had very little to lose. His only hold on them was personal ascendancy; and that was something that he had to hoard like a miser.Twining maintains firm control over all the goings-on -- not least by being ever-present, apparently never taking a vacation, and even rushing his business trips: "For the past three years at least, his hands had never been off the wheel for more than two days at a time". The novel's dramatic turn comes one third of the way in, when Twining goes to California --and is laid low by a heart attack, keeping him far away from the magazine for months convalescing. Immediately, the office vultures pounce, Brian and Fritz vying in their different ways to take over the magazine -- Brian taking charge of the latest issues, while Fritz takes the more roundabout route of wooing Harriet Wadsworth to gain her support for a new vision of the magazine.
Things do not go particularly well. Harriet is even given the drama-spot in an issue -- but when George reads her column he is convinced: "of course, that was it, it was a spoof. Nobody wrote like that in real life. It had to be a joke" .....
While George is the new man at the magazine, they really are all outsiders at The Outsider. As something of the teacher's pet early on -- Twining constantly invites George for endless drinking after work -- George is seen as a potential successor in waiting, as plausible as any of the other supposed candidates. Still settling in, George maintains a bit of wry distance, disappointed that very little here lives up to his expectations, and baffled by the different characters playing their different parts. More or less well-meaning -- they mean to do a good job -- no one really seems a right fit. Most obviously, Philo is more burden than help, but even industrious Olga -- who happens to be loaded, but is tight with her money -- can't quite do right with her efforts:
On the Monday after going to press, The Outsider was at very low pressure. Olga Marplate spent Saturday mornings tidying ferociously, so that the place was neat as a morgue when the next week began. Since the building's only possible charm lay in raffish disorder, it was a grim place to file into after a Marplate weekend.Early on already George disappointedly registers that: "Office politics in a place like this really demonstrated the puniness of the human mind", and by the end he openly admits the office is not a very adult place, pointing out to (and blaming) Twining that:
Well, you're in charge of the school, aren't you ? And I know that nobody ever grows up in it. Little Fritz still plays his practical jokes. Brian is the class grind. George Wren sits in the back and giggles.So, will the coup succeed ? And if so, whose ? Or will Twining reclaim his domain ?
Sheed follows the various characters and their maneuverings, both at the office and, in several cases domestically (George is married, and has a young child, for example), and paints a solid picture of these various lives and their odd intersections at the magazine. Office politics, in the broadest sense, does dominate, but Sheed gets into their lives beyond it, too. He's especially good at some of the details -- the meals, which play an outsize role; the drinking -- and both George and expatriate Twining are particularly well-drawn characters.
Office Politics is a comic novel, but one that's distinctly melancholy-tinged. It holds up well, not least in capturing but not stuck in 1960s New York City (and, in a very nice contrast, a touch of California), and remains an enjoyable read.
- M.A.Orthofer, 19 August 2024
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Office Politics:
- McNally Editions publicity page
- See Index of Contemporary American fiction
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American author Wilfrid Sheed lived 1930 to 2011.
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© 2024 the complete review
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