If you’re thinking about looking for a job in the corporate world after graduation, you just might think twice after reading Michael Hogan’s first novel “Man Out Of Time.” Through the eyes of the book’s narrator, Hogan paints a frank and utterly convincing picture of a company culture where getting ahead has little to do with talent, intelligence, or even hard work, and everything to do with social connections and a sharp grasp of office politics.
The young protagonist, a bright and perceptive law school graduate, sets out to begin his career at a large firm in New York City and seems doomed almost from the start. He feels a continuing sense of disconnect — from the city, his co-workers and even his friends. Though he attempts to reach out to others, his growing cynicism and his drinking habit only increase the alienation.
Through recurring chapters that recount childhood incidents, we come to know this character beyond his cool exterior. The way the book slowly converges the present with the past is a neat trick, and it makes for a satisfying ending.
But besides these personal themes, the novel goes a long way toward criticizing the culture of the big firm, and by association, that of corporate America. The firm where the narrator works has an unwritten but strict set of rules, and they create a hierarchy in which the senior partners are practically worshiped as gods. They have enough power to ruin an underling’s career with a few words and a nod of the head.
Meanwhile the legions of young associates, “overeducated, overpaid, overeager,” are completely submissive and treated like nameless servants. The tacitly acknowledged goal of most is to move up in the company until they “spend less and less energy to affect more and more, until they do just about nothing to affect just about everything.”
Unable to completely bow to this hierarchical system, the protagonist soon finds himself picked out like a weed that doesn’t belong.
“Man Out Of Time” uses a few literary devices that set it apart from most novels. Because the narrator’s name is never revealed, the reader is encouraged to identify with him and his perceptions of the world around him. The story is told in the present tense, giving an “as it happens” feel to the book. And the very striking flashback chapters that recount episodes from the narrator’s childhood take an odd but effective shift to the second person, telling the reader, “This happened when you were a kid,” as if we are being told about our own childhood.
Any one of these devices could have backfired in less able hands. But Hogan’s driving and creative prose makes it all work together to turn the novel away from the traditional sense of “this happened to someone else” and toward more reader involvement. His writing successfully borrows from the urgency of poetic form, resulting in an adventurous but focused work.
Hogan’s style is maximalist, with long sentences touching on all kinds of details and insights before ending. The impression is one of pure, unfiltered stream of consciousness, with the narrator’s mental distractions left in. The approach has a lot of potential to fall on its face, yet in this book it rarely does. Though the prose meanders, it does so with purpose, and the sentences unfailingly end on a strong note.
Finally, the characters are excellent. It’s not that Hogan tries to draw any of them completely; after all, they are all secondary to the character of the narrator. But the writing is so realistic and convincing that it never occurs to the reader to question whether they are real people. This realism combines with dreamlike metaphors in passages like this one, during the protagonist’s first meeting with his boss: “I scribble something in the midst of the ominous whirrrrrr of Chinook helicopters putt-putt-putting over my head, because Carol Schneider’s voice has become the Doppler effect of trouble.”
This gripping debut novel constantly reaches below the surface of human interactions, with clear insights about personal motivations and unspoken social dynamics. The hidden but very real war of human emotions, and especially the struggle to gain power and use it against others, is exposed front and center. “Man Out Of Time” is a good example of how a work of fiction can reveal things that nonfiction books and biographies often fail to.
Brian O’Keefe can be contacted at [email protected]