The Sales Job
Selling
Ben Cheever: Back to Square One
in a Service Economy
In the preface to Selling Ben Cheever, the author briefly imagines his funeral. He’s already mentioned that his father (John), sister (Susan) and wife (Janet Maslin) achieved as writers a success he feels eludes him. "I’m haunted by the image of a knot of bored and restless people standing near a berm of freshly turned earth and beside an open grave. Head bowed, one mourner turns to another and whispers, ‘Ben’s life does seem to have been designed to excite unflattering comparisons.’"
This plays as a self-deprecating joke, more gray-humored than black. Yet even as those words were set into galley type, Barbara Ehrenreich’s book Nickel and Dimed was showing up on best-seller lists, making comparisons, some surely unflattering to Cheever, inevitable. Each volume is a nonfiction account of a writer’s experience working a series of low-glamour jobs. Ehrenreich scrubbed floors, waited tables and policed ladies’ wear at a Wal-Mart. Cheever sold cars, made sandwiches and put in time at Nobody Beats the Wiz.
But while Nickel and Dimed is basically a serious argument, Cheever’s book is more of a comedy and, as its title suggests, more of a sales job. That is, he’s a bit more circumspect about what it is he wants us to buy into, mixing amusingly gonzo-ish accounts of working as a sidewalk Santa or in a haunted house with grim and sweeping assertions about corporate downsizing.
Cheever got started on his adventures on the front lines of the service economy in 1995. In the six years since, the American economy soared and then sputtered, and Cheever passed from his late 40’s to early 50’s. He held a lot of jobs (many more than Ehrenreich), and at times he put the whole enterprise on hold; as he freely acknowledges, he doesn’t actually need to work at all.
Because he did so many different kinds of work over such a long span, the book is more episodic than narrative. This gives it a choppy feeling, but some of the episodes are quite funny, or heartbreaking, or both. One of the best sections recounts his stint behind the counter at Cosi Sandwich Bar, the fancy lunch chain. He likes his co-workers and his manager. He is paid $6.25 an hour, and he does his best: a 51-year-old man with a positive attitude, trying to master the sandwich production line well enough to keep his young colleagues from resenting him. When he picks up the nickname Slow G (as in Grandpa), it’s funny. But ultimately his rendering of how his struggle to avoid failure plays out is vivid and honest, sometimes painfully so.
Most of the work he tells about is sales work, and the basic leitmotif is failure. Stores fail to be honest with consumers, shoppers fail to treat retail workers like human beings, bosses fail to help employees, some (not all) employees fail to help one another, and most of all Cheever fails to find a way to fit in, make the sale, satisfy his bosses or his customers. Or himself.
Maybe this is why the other highlight is a chapter on his stint as a car salesman. Even though the jacket copy tells us this is the one area where he found success, it’s still startling when it happens. What he liked most about his suburban dealership was the chummy camaraderie among the salespeople, who seemed to spend more time telling bawdy jokes than working. He even got into a shouting match with one of his bosses But he also, it turns out, sold some cars, and when that same boss congratulates him, after so many pages of coming up short, you practically want to cheer.
An interesting wrinkle is that Cheever’s last steady gig, before he quit to write novels, was as an editor at Reader’s Digest, which for much of its existence was a near parody of the genteel Organization Man sensibility. He describes it as a clubby place where the editors had many clever names for the martini and where the understanding between company and employee was roughly, "Stay here, stay loyal, work hard and you’ll always have a job." Though Cheever was gone by the time the company joined the mid-1990’s downsizing frenzy, this betrayal of that imaginary ideal seems to be a source of lasting bitterness and hurt.
One of the questions Cheever never quite answers is whether this is also the source of his discontent with the current state of work in America. What is the idea, exactly, that he’s trying to sell us? Sometimes it seems that the mission of "Selling Ben Cheever" is simply to make us feel sorry for the author. That pitiful funeral scene is one of many in which he reminds his readers that John Cheever was a renowned author, while Ben Cheever got started on this project and its "humiliating" series of jobs because he couldn’t sell his third novel. "I’ve often confused losing with being a good sport," he moans.
On the other hand, he strongly implies that in writing about "the heroism of the hourly worker" he’s making a kind of political critique of the American economy’s human toll. "Taking the jobs I held for this book," he declares, "has strengthened my own conviction that we live in a society increasingly segregated . . . by class and income." Was he giving that conviction a lot of thought over martinis at the Digest? Or has he been radicalized by the post-Organization world? If in some circles a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged, maybe a liberal is a conservative who’s been downsized.
Either answer would be interesting, since there’s not much question which class produced the author: he’s a well-read prep school grad whose real life is full of dinner parties and panel discussions, who wonders if one co-worker’s cornrows are "an expression of hostility" and guesses at the educational pedigree of another who happens to "look Ivy." He was raised, he says, to believe that if things didn’t go well he could always sell suits at Brooks Brothers (one of the jobs for which he was rejected, it turns out). "The basic rules are the same on the Upper East Side as they are on a car lot," he says by way of defending car salesmen, meaning that they are "a lot like the people we know." We?
I suspect that Cheever wants these apparently disparate ideas (the book is about him; the book is about America) to work in concert. It’s the spectacle of someone with this background robbed of a chance to belong somewhere, and reduced to a state of perpetual self-salesmanship, that Cheever figures the reader will ultimately find humorous and terrifying. "Work," he writes, "is about identity almost as much as it’s about cash." That’s a popular idea these days, but maybe not a pleasant one if you’re confronted with meaningless employment. If this is Cheever’s soft sell, I’m not sure he quite closes the deal. But he does make a pretty entertaining pitch.
A very similar version of this review appeared in the October 14, 2001 edition of the New York Times Book Review.
