The real world - Hardcover

Knowlton, Christopher

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0689114397 ISBN 13: 9780689114397

Publisher: Atheneum, 1984

Synopsis

The name on the r&#233;sum&#233; reads <i>Caleb Sparrow</i>: recent college graduate, son of a corporate titan, and amateur bird watcher. What he <i>doesn't </i>tell the interviewer at New York's premier management consulting firm, where he is applying for the position of research analyst, is that, unitl now, his only real goal has been to spot an ivory-billed woodpecker in the Big Thicket of East Texas—a dream he's put aside for a career in business because "business looks romantic." Instead, Caleb tells the interviewer that his ambition is to join H&amp;L because the broad managment experience of a job in consulting provides is the best initiation into the corporate world. And so Caleb is hired—but what he learns about the real world of business is that it is no aviary of ivory-billed birds, but a jungle presided over by carpricious birds of prey. <br> <br><br>In this savagely funny and deliciously entertaining novel we join Caleb as he traverses an elating yet bewildering minefield of rites of passage, both in the office and in the gentrified social enclaves of Manhattan's Upper East Side. We watch Caleb struggle with deadlines, malfunctioning calculators, a callow banker roommate, and the whims of his employers; and his adventures take us from soft-carpeted board rooms to a seminar in executive survival techniques. Then a fateful office romance with a blond, brainy Harvard MBA and a disastrous presentation to a cabal of arrogant clients—an episode of corporate power-brokering as hilarous and chilling as any in recent fiction—precipitate a crisis. Suddenly Caleb's romantic certainties are thrown into confusion, and he must decide whether or not to "step irrevocably aboard."<br> <br><br><i>The Real World </i>is <i>The Graduate </i>updated and Caleb Sparrow is a gray-flannel-suited Holden Caulfield gone Wall Street. It is, as well, a marvelously original and penetrating novel in its own right. In the course of Caleb's discovery that the society of business professionals is less than just and that the pursuit of the American Dream entails some unavoidable, sobering compromisies, we marke the debut of Christopher Knowlton, a writer of wit and style whose knowing, sympathetic, and long-overdue portrait of today's young business professional just may become a classic.

About this title

About the Author

Christopher Knowlton was educated at Phillips Exeter Academy and Harvard College. He spent two years in New York working in publishing and management consulting before moving to the Berkshires to write fiction. Since then he has taught at Berkshire School and worked as a maitre d' at a local restaurant. He is twenty-eight years old, and this is his first novel.

From the Back Cover

"The Real World is in the line of Catcher in the Rye and The Graduate, but it is a much better book than the latter. This is a cleanly told, unattitudinizing glimpse into hell. Eighties Youth! Read this before you join a corporation!" - Roy Blount, Jr., author of Crackers

"When I was in college we used to kid around about 'what are you going to do when you get out in the real world?'; I'd recommend The Real World to anyone who's pondered the difference between selling out and buying in. Caleb Sparrow's coming of age is a wry, witty observation of what we've become." - Bruce Feirstein, author of Real Men Don't Eat Quiche

"A sobering look at the young pin-stripe generation and its competitive spirit." - Adam Smith, Esquire

"A gentle, funny novel that made me care about a group of people it often seems hard to care about--the '80s generation of ambitious, driven, frightened young Americans who are gravitating to the world og big business. Christopher Knowlont has real talent." - Bob Greene, author American Beat

"Christopher Knowlton has delivered the goods in a novel that explains his generation's decision to go the Wall Street rout. This is a fine and funny book!" - John Jay Osborne, author of The Paper Chase

Edition details

• Publisher: Atheneum
• Publication date: 1984
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0689114397
• ISBN 13: 9780689114397
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 246