BOOK
The Gist: Well-heeled Take On The Downwardly Mobile
$25.95
As a senior editor at Reader's Digest, Ben Cheever savored the rich pickings of the corporate life: power dining with Sam Nunn, riding the company jet, and smoking Cuban cigars. After work, he banged out less-than-best-selling novels, struggling to bear up under the heavy mantle of his father's literary rep.
When he discovered, after leaving the Digest to make it as a writer, that he couldn't sell his third novel, he conceived a nonfiction book about life among the downwardly mobile: "I'd play out everybody's worst nightmare, take entry-level jobs." Selling Ben Cheever is that book - a chronicle of the author's tragicomic stints as a car salesman, sidewalk Santa, Borders clerk, and Mac man at CompUSA. "'Oh, so you're into this now,' said a woman who had been an editor with me at the Reader's Digest. I can't know, but I thought from the way she worked her face that she was thinking, Ben never was all that smart. " What, exactly, is Selling Ben Cheever selling? Grim stats about the widening income gap seem to set us up for a mad-as-hell teardown of the new economy. Instead, we get a self-flagellating account of a "natural-born bust's" days as a wage slave after he fails to deliver on the promise of the Cheever brand. The author's funny-sad dispatches from the $7 an hour nightmare are part of a story that desperately needs telling, but his Hallmark homilies about the "heroism of the hourly worker" blunt its edge.
As does its fundamental dishonesty. Cheever passes as one of the downsized, but he wasn't sacked from Reader's Digest - he quit - and anyone who's ever gotten pink-slipped knows the bitter difference. Moreover, it's hard to feel the pain of a guy who's married to film critic Janet Maslin and owns "one of those watches designed to whisper, 'I cost a lot of money.'" His insistence that his financial security afforded him a journalistic freedom he wouldn't have had if he had "actually roasted in economic hell" fails to convince. You can never know what it's like to live a paycheck away from homelessness if there's a safety net to stop your fall. I keep thinking about the guy in Selling Ben Cheever who gambles everything on a frozen yogurt stand that goes belly-up. He wants Cheever to write a book about him. "We could lose the house," he tells the author, in tears. "It's a great story. ... And if it weren't true, it would be funny," replies Cheever.
Bloomsbury: www.BloomsburyMagazine.com.
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