Trust Me on This

Memoirs are normally acts of exorcism, but “Selling Ben Cheever” is more an act of masochism. Having received a chilly reception from his publishers when he approached them with the draft of a new novel, his third, Ben Cheever decided to quit writing and take a series of service jobs. “This is a book about failure,” he writes in his preface, “and I haven’t even been consistently successful at that.”

That’s an odd, courageous and profoundly un-American thing to say. Failure is a story few people, writers included, want to get close to, which makes Cheever’s voyage through the minimum-wage economy at the age of fortysomething both affecting and exceptional.

For his sins, Cheever goes to work, mostly in the malls in and around White Plains, N.Y., “eat[ing] dog food ... in discreet little bites,” as he puts it. He is a salesman at Nobody Beats the Wiz, where he has to ask the assistant manager for a bathroom break. He makes sandwiches at Cosi, the upscale cafe, where he keeps forgetting the ingredients and where he is nicknamed “Slow G” for Slow Gramps. He sells cars at a GM showroom, when anyone with an ounce of talent is on the Toyota lot next door. At times he does adequately, but he never really does well. He tends to quit just before being fired.

Although born into the preppy classes--he is the son of the writer John--there is nothing condescending in his experiences. Once he is about to sell an expensive Mac to a woman at CompUSA when another comes in asking for screw sleeves. He desperately tries to satisfy her, to get back to his big score, only to be interrupted by a man wanting a cable. “At my back I could almost hear that other sale going away, slipping from my grasp,” he writes with an edge of desperation. Eventually, he decides to try to cut his losses: When he runs into his first customer again he started “gushing apologies

Cheever is also brave enough to let himself be the least appealing character in his book. Even his kids, blond mementos of his earlier life, are repulsed by how far he has sunk. When one accompanies him to work at the Wiz, he asks if his father is still a writer. “Sure I am,” Cheever replies, adding to readers, “the bluff being a basic parental move.” There’s an admirable honesty to any writer willing to record that moment.

Another time he sells H. Cabot Lodge a computer and tells him that he too “has a famous name.” Lodge is polite but could care less: Cheever is the help. And there are all the anonymous characters who parade through these pages: the indignant blond with the good figure, the man in suspenders who degraded Cheever when he accidentally dropped a Buffalo chicken nugget in the mayonnaise. People who have money are always jerks, one CompUSA salesman tells him. Nothing in this book would suggest otherwise.

Life is tough on those who sell, and when Cheever makes $4,000 one month as a GM salesman, he almost cries. “It’s shaming to admit, but this counts as one of the half-dozen happiest moments of my life,” he writes. “My heart was racing, my pulse was roaring in my ears. I could feel tingling in the soles of my feet.”

Ashamed but insistent: That’s Ben, your sales associate. He learns never to say “May I help you?”--we’ll just turn away--and instead “Who’s the lucky person buying a new car today.” In a word, he learns to sell and, in the process, passes on a few of the profession’s dirty little tricks.

Don’t buy the repair warranty at CompUSA. Check the numbers the car dealership gives you. If the sales guy pushes a certain computer, it’s because it’s a “spiff”--marked for extra commission. Here’s another one: car salesmen always give you the leasing cost and the financing cost. Why? That way you think you’re making the decision, but either way he’s making a sale.

As Cheever masters these techniques, you see him changing, and each little alteration in his personality breaks your heart. Because what Cheever is doing isn’t so different from what we are doing, melding ourselves to our workplaces.

Human relationships, we begin to see in the course of “Selling Ben Cheever,” are about selling because all interaction is really persuading. And the secret to persuasion is the ability to make others trust you. One Wiz instructor writes on the blackboard: “F.U.D. Fear. Uncertainty. Doubt” and tells Ben that overcoming them is the key to a sale. Take the customer out of his anxieties and you bring him to the cash register. This book is full of such Dale Carnegie-like tips.

These revelations, ugly little insights into the business of business, don’t make you angry by the end. They make you feel alive. You see them as part of the endless social mechanism by which we love and are loved. If part of the time you are the customer, the rest of the time you are the salesman. We all do it. To know this is to know something important, something ultimately calming. “Selling Ben Cheever,” to use what the publishing industry calls a “selling quote,” is a smart, brave and unusual book that should be read by anyone interested in the shape of the modern workplace--that is, of modern life.