Barry, Max. Company: a novel. New York: Doubleday, 2006. ISBN 0-385-51439-5.

Summary: A moderately clever, ambitious, but mostly honest young man is hired as a sales assistant in the Training Sales department of Zephyr Holdings, a company that opaquely summarizes its nature and purpose in the following mission statement:

Zephyr Holdings aims to build and consolidate leadership positions in its chosen markets, forging profitable growth opportunities by developing strong relationships between internal and external business units and coordinating a strategic, consolidated approach to achieve maximum returns for its stakeholders.

Puzzled by this document, and bewildered by his initial observations of the work of his colleagues, which appears to consist entirely of pointless bureaucratic paper-shuffling and petty political infighting, unrelated even remotely to the production of any actual goods or services, the young man tries to make inquiries, and blunders into the discovery that this vast corporate enterprise is not run, as everyone supposes, by the nominal decision-makers in Senior Management, but rather by a tiny coterie of insiders, mysteriously named “Project Alpha,” for their own nefarious purposes.

The young man is admitted to this secret society, although he has qualms about its motives and good reason to doubt the sanity of its leaders. Eventually, he figures out how to simultaneously undermine Project Alpha from within and induce it to overreach, and a catastrophe ensues. An epilogue shows two survivors of the wreck, the young man and a particularly charming co-worker, making their respective livings as corporate lecturers on business ethics.

This is, of course, a savage satire, but it is surprising how little the author needs to stretch reality in order to generate his cruelest effects. There is nothing very unusual or unfamiliar about the business practices of Zephyr Holdings, and indeed this turns out to be a requirement of the plot. When the newly hired young man visits the local Barnes and Noble and picks up a copy of the latest fad book on management methods and modern business practices (to display on a shelf in his cubicle, in order to convey the impression that he is a rising star with management potential), it is no accident that the book's vision of the workplace corresponds closely to the young man's on-the-job experiences at Zephyr.