Office Politics

Nominated for a National Book Award in 1966, Sheed’s thoughtful workplace satire transfers that truism about the most vicious infighting being over the lowest stakes, from academia to the drab Manhattan offices of The Outsider, a small fortnightly magazine with large pretensions. Sleek, donnish chief editor Gilbert Twining presides over a cadre of disaffected staff who perpetually maneuver and connive in pursuit of tiny increments of power and status. Newest member George Wren is now rethinking his recent decision to leave lowbrow CBS, sacrificing pay for prestige, only to find himself in a petty purgatory of thwarted ambitions and unhappy happy hours sure to wring shudders of recognition from any white-collar worker. A keen but sympathetic observer, Sheed invests his malcontents with intelligence, and vulnerability. When Twining is sidelined by a heart attack, the dog finally catches the car, unleashing a scrimmage of shifting allegiances and abortive power grabs that crystallize for Wren his place on a playground of jockeying egos, suggesting a means of transcending banal discontent for a more meaningful existence.