Discoveries
The Company
A Short History
of a Revolutionary Idea
John Micklethwait
and Adrian Wooldridge
Modern Library: 212 pp., $19.95
“The Company” is a swashbuckling journey through the past and into the future of the modern company, from the partnerships and power sharing of the Assyrians to the 12th century campagnias in Italy (the first notion of shared liability) to the chartered companies of the 16th and 17th centuries, to the rise of labor unions and trust-busting. John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge have put together a whirlwind tour, but it’s digestible. Only when we get closer to the present do we come to understand, like the authors, that scandals like Enron are part of company life. It’s not the end of the world, nor is it the end of the company as economic building block.
But the company, they conclude, has lost one too many battles against the state. “From the company’s point of view, two clouds have gathered on the horizon: the cloud of corporate scandal and the cloud of social responsibility.”
*
Exquisite Corpse
Robert Irwin
Overlook Press: 235 pp.,
$14.95 paper
Exquisite Corpse is the name of the game played by the Surrealist artists in which one artist would draw the head, fold the paper and pass it along for his neighbor to draw the torso before folding the paper and passing it again “until some marvelous hybrid emerged from the unfolded paper.” This novel, set throughout Europe in the 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s, was first published in 1995 and is now being reprinted, just when we need most to relearn the language of irrationality.
Caspar, our 25-year-old narrator, is a member of the Serapian Brotherhood, a group with 20 to 30 members that formed just before World War I. They meet at the Dead Rat Club. Caspar doesn’t keep a diary, he keeps a “noctuary, in which I record the little which has happened to me while I am asleep. If you are curious about my parentage, know then that Lautreamont was my father and Alice in Wonderland my mother. As for my infancy, I am still in it.” Caspar meets, at least he thinks he meets, the most beautiful girl in the world, Caroline, a secretary in a fur factory. But she disappears. Did he kill her? “What you hold in your hands is not literature,” he warns, “but a magical trap. Its sole purpose is to seek out Caroline.” Figures known (Andre Breton, “black pope of surrealism”) and unknown (Mark, seducer of nuns) wander through the novel, preparing for a future in which the Surrealists will rule the world: “Surrealist taxi drivers will take us to mysterious destinations, we will need Surrealist sewer workers to investigate the depths of the Unconscious and we will need Surrealist secretaries to take down the dictates of the Marvelous at 120 words per minute.” There’s something tremendously soothing about this hysterical novel, as if the world destroys and remakes itself more often than we think.
*
Dispatches From
the Muckdog
Gazette
A Mostly Affectionate Account
of a Small Town’s Fight to Survive
Bill Kauffman
Henry Holt: 206 pp., $22
“I wanted to be the nativest son,” says Bill Kauffman of his return home in 1988 to Batavia, N.Y. (pop. 16,256 “and shrinking”). Having tasted the fast life of a Senate staffer, editor and writer in Washington, D.C., and Southern California, Kauffman felt that returning home, in our culture, was “an act of rebellion.” “I am -- fanatically, unapologetically -- a placeist,” he announces proudly. Batavia, along with the rest of Genessee County, N.Y., has had its heyday, has “burned out,” has seen better times. Kauffman’s people date back to the 1850s. The town has its legendary dead poet, Methodist minister John Yates (close enough), and its big league novelist, John Gardner, who accidentally killed his 6-year-old brother when he was 11 while driving a tractor. You might not feel the urge to up and move to Batavia, but Kauffman does stir up a longing for a hometown of one’s own, a town that doesn’t stretch on forever, a town that your ancestors, perhaps, played a role in building.