Office Politics

Wilfrid Sheed

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Ever since college, George Wren has dreamed of working at The Outsider, the prestigious weekly edited by his hero, the suave English expat Gilbert Twining. So when George sees a listing for a junior editor, he trades in his job at CBS for half the salary—and a ringside seat in the unexpectedly cutthroat arena of a small-circulation, highpow little magazine. To George's surprise and dismay, The Outsider is seething with malcontents and mutineers, at least according to Twining, who keeps cornering George for after-work martinis, pouring out his anxieties, professional and otherwise, while George's wife, Matilda, and baby son wait for him back in Queens. Is Twining paranoid? Is he insane? Or are George's new office-mates truly plotting an insurrection? And if so, what's all of it got to do with George? An indelible satire of 1960s intellectual New York, Office Politics is also a celepation of that endangered species, the office, at its pettiest and most idealistic, as the proving ground where so much of grownup life takes place.