The real world

Knowlton, Christopher

ISBN 10: 0689114397 / ISBN 13: 9780689114397

Published by Atheneum, 1984

About this Item

Signed by author on half title page. Very Good green boards with green lettering along spine. Binding and hinges tight and slightly cocked; Contents clean and unmarked, except signed by author, and writing on FFEP. VG dust jacket not price clipped; light rubbing along edges, small chips at spine and repaired tear. 246 pages. Stated First edition.

Seller Inventory # 040667

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The real world
• Publisher: Atheneum
• Publication Date: 1984
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0689114397
• ISBN 13: 9780689114397
• Binding: hardcover
• Edition: First Edition.
• Condition: Used: Very Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Used: Very Good
• Signed: Signed by Author
• Seller catalogs:
  • Fiction:Adult:

About this title

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 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.