Company by Max Barry

In college a friend introduced me to the strangely addictive NationStates, an online game loosely related to Barry’s previous novel, Jennifer Government. I had enjoyed Barry’s humorous capitalist dystopia, so when I saw Company, emblazoned with a partially-consumed doughnut, upon the new fiction shelves at B&N, I had to read it.

The author takes his predilection for corporate intrigue to new heights, limiting the novel’s scope to a single company, and aside from a few anecdotes, to a single employee. Although the office humor doesn’t stand up to genre leaders Office Space or The Office, Company is a fun (and quick) read; Barry’s writing is concise and clever, and his characters are enjoyably quirky. The novel is best, however, when it leaves the mundanity of normal office life for the conspiracy and scheming of Zephyr Holdings. Unfortunately, just when things are getting thoroughly bizarre, Company abruptly ends without a satisfying denouement to bring closure to the protagonist-antagonist relationship.

Though a sketch of a novel, Company, along with Barry’s other work, is a welcome addition to the underrepresented genre of business fiction.