Since the Layoffs - Softcover

Levison, Iain

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1569473625 ISBN 13: 9781569473627

Publisher: Soho Press, 2004

Synopsis

"[A] dark, satirical comedy. . . . Written with the same kind of deadpan humor Levison used so well in his first book."—USA Today

"A gleeful satire. . . . It’s an amusingly bleak little (im)moral fable."—Detroit Free Press

"Exciting, funny, poignant and sociologically important."—The Chicago Tribune

"Levison’s irony is acute as he caricatures the working world’s groundlings."—The New York Times Book Review

The work Jake Skowran is offered is a lot less than legal. He’s got little choice except to take it. The guys who owned the factory have left town for someplace where there’s more sun and cheaper labor. The deserted plant is fenced in and the fence topped with razor wire, as if they’d worried that the locals would steal tractor-building equipment and start making tractors in their basements. Jake’s girlfriend has also decamped (along with the vacuum cleaner and the entertainment center).

"She went off with some used car dealer, huh?" his bookie mocks.

"He was a new car dealer," Jake retorts.

Jake’s got six months of unemployment left before he’s dead broke and the locks get changed. Life has turned into one big downgrade. It has downsized and hardened him. He’s up for anything. The economy is pain, lies and silliness, and he is going to carve off a piece of it for himself or die trying.

Iain Levison is the author of A Working Stiff’s Manifesto, an account of his postcollegiate work experience, consisting of 42 jobs in 10 years. He lives in Philadelphia.

About this title

About the Author:

Iain Levison is the author of A Working Stiff's Manifesto, an account of his post-collegiate work experience, consisting of forty-two jobs in ten years, and two novels, Since the Layoffs and Dog Eats Dog. He lives in Raleigh, North Carolina.

From Booklist:

Like Donald Westlake in The Ax (1997), about an insurance executive turned hit man, Levison brings a burning rage to this accomplished debut novel. Ever since Jake Skowran lost his job when the town factory closed, he has been fending off his creditors with increasingly vitriolic rants. His longtime girlfriend has left him, and his unemployment is due to run out. So when Ken Gardocki, a backwater bookie and drug dealer, offers Jake $5,000 to kill Ken's wife, Jake accepts without hesitation. He goes on to kill three more people, including a corporate flack who hassles Jake about wearing a smock at his new minimum-wage job at the Gas 'n' Go. Levison has a wickedly sardonic sense of humor and a real feel for the disconnect between the line peddled in employee manuals and the way things actually play out in the workplace. In addition, the murder scenes are horrific--panic-laden, brutal moments of mayhem. A deep outrage over wrecked lives and towns underpins this ferociously articulate assault on corporate and personal ethics. Joanne Wilkinson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About this edition

• Publisher: Soho Press
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 1569473625
• ISBN 13: 9781569473627
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 188