The Job
Douglas Kennedy
Little Brown, hbk, 387pp, £12.99
Reviewed by Gerald Houghton (1997)

The first thing to say about Douglas Kennedy is that he’s rigorous. The Job, like his two previous books - The Dead Heart and The Big Picture - is plotted with almost mathematical precision. The second is that he still has a problem with endings.

Ned Allen has it all: relative youth, a beautiful and successful wife, a swish New York apartment, and a career in computer magazine sales on an exponential curve. ‘The sort of person to whom results mean everything.’ Until, that is, the business is unexpectedly acquired by a voracious German conglomerate and Ned has to make some tough calls. A little friendly blackmail. Manoeuvring behind the boss’s back for his job. And punching out one of the Germans’ senior executives. He’s suddenly a hero to the little people, even while his career is in freefall. Especially after a former employee commits suicide and his wife walks out, and the big fish really begin to circle.

Kennedy’s novels are about choices. About how success is always the victim of a single wrong turn, the tiniest miscall. And he’s great at it, at meticulously hunting down the chaotic effects.

Which does rather let The Job’s latter half down. Because this is very much a book of two halves, and while neither - corporate collapse or corrupt schemery - is bad, nor are they opposing sides of the same coin. We have to take a little too much on trust. And nor is the first - with its macho, chest-beating dialogue about ‘landing’ deals - as Glengarry Glen Ross as some might like you to believe. Kennedy cannot write like David Mamet. And in actual fact it’s the second, with its tricks and facades and off-shore accounts, that echoes the more playful Mamet, the writer-director of House of Games and The Spanish Prisoner.

It’s an entertainment, as Kennedy himself acknowledged of his other books: slick and ingenious and quickly digested. But again blessed with an abrupt, unconvincing tie-up. He’s good at painting himself into corners, just not so hot at extricating himself again. Still, the ride at least is great fun, and any book taking a gratuitous pop at that bard of techno-fascism, Tom Clancy, can’t be all bad.