COMPANY by Max Barry

Reviewed by Ellen Wernecke

Something’s rotten in the state of corporation in Max Barry’s third novel Company. Sales assistant Jones has been recruited out of college to work for Zephyr, a busy and successful company which does… well, Jones isn’t sure, but he’s eager to find out. Rivalries stripe his new department of Training Sales, but all Jones knows is that he’s already earned the ire of his cubicle-mate, who hasn’t been promoted in five years.

Chasing after missing donuts by day and reading organizational manuals by night, Jones becomes obsessed with the company’s small mysteries – why the floors go from 20th at ground level to 1st at the top, for example, or why the department seems to only make sales in-house. But when he makes it to where the CEO’s penthouse is supposed to sit, he discovers a secret more horrifying than the absence of a donut at the mid-morning meeting – that a secret board is running Zephyr as a test lab for management strategy, and that they control everything from the elevators to the fact that no one in the office uses Jones’ first name.

Company is “Office Space” meets “The Truman Show,” a straight-faced comedy in which everyone is lying and only the wily can get away with telling the truth. Corporate doublespeak is naturally hilarious, but Barry pushes the envelope by showing the puppeteers who are pulling the strings to control the company, along with the disinformation they feed back into the machine. Jones continues to work in Training Skills even as a reorganization forces his whole team against itself, but he can’t help thinking of them as more than test subjects – his weakness as a member of the Alpha board which controls Zephyr from within.

It’s the ordinary people, not the board, who develop into multidimensional characters in Barry’s hands, from the saleswoman carrying a coworker’s child to Jones’ complacent, cheerful trainer. The closest member to human on the Alpha board, the alluring and powerful secretary who recruits Jones to the team, is interesting only as a temptation to him. As Jones wavers between secret mission and business as usual, the line between the corrupt and the corrupted grows thinner and thinner.