Just finished James Hynes’ Kings of Infinite Space, which I found a little disappointing after his very funny The Lecturer’s Tale. KOISP takes up a failed academic (his downfall is described in a previous Hynes novella) who ends up temping as a typist/technical writer for the Texas state government. There’s some clever, funny commentary along the way, including this description of the protagonist’s previous job working for a school textbook company.
For eight months Paul sat in a little gray cube under harsh fluorescent lighting and composed grammar exercises for grades six through twelve. His job was to accommodate an old workbook by expunging any content that did not meet the textbook guidelines of Texas and California, the company’s two biggest markets. Fundamentalist Texas forbade even the most benign references to the supernatural (the first step towards the Satanic sacrifice of newborns), while nutritionally correct California forbade any references to red meat, white sugar or dairy products (the biochemical causes of racism, sexism and homophobia).
Still, the book just doesn’t have as much venom and verve as The Lecturer’s Tale. The setting isn’t as developed; the character sketches aren’t as pointed or as sharp. My very strong impression is that Hynes is much more comfortable describing academia than bureaucracy and office politics - his best jokes still riff off academic debates. Further, the main conceit of the book - downsized penpushers turned feral ghouls, scuttling through the ceilings and walls of office buildings - has been done before, and done better, in William Browning Spencer’s wonderfully droll Resume with Monsters. If you want to read a funny dead-end-job/comedy/horror mash-up, read Browning Spencer; if you want to read Hynes at his best, buy or borrow The Lecturer’s Tale. Unfortunately, Kings of Infinite Space simply isn’t as good as either.
“downsized clerks turned feral ghouls who live in the ceilings and walls of the office building”
Also done by Dilbert, less ferociously. The downsized one infiltrates the system to call pointless meetings, in order that he can feast on the uneaten doughnuts afterwards.
I’d also recommend Penelope Fitzgerald’s story in The Penguin Book of Ghost Stories (also to be found in Means of Escape, most of which you should read). I’m not disclosing which story it is for scruples about spoilage.
I recently backtracked to Publish and Perish, and was pleased to find it at the same level as The Lecturer’s Tale; sorry to hear that the latest is but a pale shade of the former.
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