The Real World
About this book
The name on the resume reads Caleb Sparrow: recent college graduate, son of a corporate titan, and amateur bird watcher. What he doesn’t tell the interviewer at New York’s premier management consulting firm, where he is applying for the position of research analyst, is that, until 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 look romantic.” Instead, Caleb tells the interviewer that his ambition is to join H&L because the broad management experience 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 capricious birds of prey.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 hilarious 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."The Real World is The Graduate 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 mark 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.