Selling Ben Cheever: Back to Square One in a Service Economy - Hardcover

Cheever, Benjamin

3.5

62 ratings by Goodreads

9781582341583: Selling Ben Cheever: Back to Square One in a Service Economy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1582341583 ISBN 13: 9781582341583

Publisher: Bloomsbury USA, 2001

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Ben Cheever's hilarious and profound odyssey through the want-ad world.

In 1995, America was in the throes of downsizing-fever. Many thousands then, as now, were losing their jobs to the corporate demand of more money for the top, by tightening the belt below. Unable to sell his latest novel, Ben Cheever started to think about what employment opportunities were out there. Mustering his courage, he skimmed the want-ads, made some phone calls, went to interviews, and ended up as everything from a security guard to a computer salesman.

Rejected by Brooks Brothers, accepted as a sandwich maker, successful as a car salesman, Cheever brilliantly chronicles life on the other side of the counter. As we see him confront his own demons about what a particular job means to him, we are compelled to consider how our egos are affected by not only what we do, but how we do it. It is through Ben's experiences that we begin to think about our approach to our own jobs and to confront our fears about what we would do if we didn't have them.

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About the Author:

Benjamin Hale Cheever has been a reporter for daily newspapers and an editor at Reader's Digest. He is the author of the acclaimed novels The Plagiarist, The Partisan, and Famous After Death, and the editor of The Letters of John Cheever. He has taught at Bennington College and The New School for Social Research.

From Publishers Weekly:

Where Barbara Ehrenreich surveyed the low-wage workplace with righteous indignation in Nickel and Dimed, novelist Cheever (Famous After Death) recounts his entry-level service jobs with rueful humor. His economic security (thanks to his wife) allows him to write about ventures that otherwise would be shrouded in shame, he says, leaving him with "bragging rights as a failure," since his novels haven't sold. Not everyone will buy that posture, but Cheever manages to combine empathy and edginess in his episodic chapters. As a security guard, he follows instructions to the letter, calling the cops to report a suspicious garbage truck. On the selling floor at CompUSA, he concludes that customers often just wanted to be listened to. At the more Darwinian electronics store Nobody Beats the Wiz, he finds the job's "moral unpleasantness" always pushing that extra insurance compounded by physical privation, as employees must ask permission to use the toilet. Versions of the best chapters have already appeared in print. At the high-volume, high-quality Cos� Sandwich Bar in Manhattan as reported in Gourmet magazine Cheever is known as "Slow G," short for "Slow Grandpa." At Borders Books & Music as he recounted in the New York Times Book Review he writes, "My enthusiasm seemed strangely out of place, and actually alarmed many of the customers." At the Auto Mall as told in the New Yorker he learns, "When you come here, you'll be selling Ben Cheever first." He likes the work, despite the inevitable deception, suggesting that the semi-faux charm of car salesmen is much like that wielded in other social circles. "I've grown to respect the people on the other side of the counter," concludes Cheever, declaring that there is camaraderie and decency in even humble jobs. (Oct.)~Forecast: Though more of a meditation than a manifesto, this book should be a natural for talk show and other discussions.

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