Office Politics

Ever since college, George Wren has dreamed of working at The Outsider, the prestigious weekly edited by his hero, the suave English expat Gilbert Twining. So when George sees a listing for a junior editor, he trades in his job at CBS for half the salary—and a ringside seat in the unexpectedly cutthroat arena of a small-circulation, highbrow little magazine. To George’s surprise and dismay, The Outsider is seething with malcontents and mutineers, at least according to Twining, who keeps cornering George for after-work martinis, pouring out his anxieties, professional and otherwise, while George’s wife, Matilda, and baby son wait for him back in Queens. Is Twining paranoid? Is he insane? Or are George’s new office-mates truly plotting an insurrection? And if so, what’s all of it got to do with George? 

An indelible satire of 1960s intellectual New York, Office Politics is also a celebration of that endangered species, the office, at its pettiest and most idealistic, as the proving ground where so much of grownup life takes place.

“Sometimes books find ways to outlive the neglect of publishers, booksellers and readers, and take on quiet lives of their own. One can only hope that in time this will happen to Office Politics, the best of Sheed’s novels and one that remains uncommonly fresh after all these years . . .  Sheed is one of the lamentably few American writers who understand that the office is at least as much home for many of us as home itself, as a result of which the tiny little staff of literary/journalistic hacks at the Outsider becomes a metaphor—a wholly convincing one—for any office anywhere, maybe even yours . . . [A] very funny, very wise, unjustly neglected book.”

—Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post

“A masterpiece … One of the few genuinely comic novels since Lucky Jim.”

—Elaine Dundy

“Mr. Sheed is a master . . . Classical in structure and style, this, his best work, realizes its comic intention with grace and clarity . . . This is a fine work indeed, by a virtuoso of the comic who never hits below the belt and never misses his mark.”

—Albert Duhamel, New York Times

“Office Politics is about work, but it is also about something deeper than that: The decline of meaningful work. It is about how we can grow up and find a measure of happiness by becoming reconciled to our own ordinariness . . . [Sheed] never forgets his duty to entertain and care for the reader’s patience. Office Politics . . . deftly paints a small canvas, does its business efficiently, and is full of sharp, quotable phrases. Couldn’t that stand as the definition of a minor masterpiece?”

—John Broening, Electric Literature

“Mr. Sheed is a writer of deft but deceptively offhand wit. He sees through things to the sources of the aching pains and fleeting satisfactions of modern American middle-class existence . . . As a guide to how the game is played . . . Office Politics is an expert work, and a gasser, too . . . Mr. Sheed has much to say about how we treat and mistreat each other in the daily round—that is in the essentials—of ordinary and supposedly civilized life.”

—Eliot Fremont-Smith, New York Times

“Part Chesterton and part Evelyn Waugh and part Cyril Connelly. He nods at Mr. Cheever, Elizabeth Hardwick and Jean Stafford. He is clean, but sly.”

—John Leonard

“A fable of the Innocent American victorious, the ordinary chap coming through. A moral tale. Perhaps only a moral tale could be so easily humorous, so notably nonvicious, so gently penetrating in its satire, so marvelously ludicrous without being grotesque.”

—Julian Gloag, Saturday Review

“What I love about Sheed’s writing is his genial wit and shrewd literary, cultural, and political assessments . . . He packs so much verbal agility and fun into nearly every sentence . . . It is hard to read [him] without experiencing a rare kind of euphoria—a sense that he is determined to give the reader as much amusement as he had writing the piece.”

—Paul Baumann, Commonweal

“[A] quiet, cutting comedy of manners . . . Sheed's muted irony can make the most puerile antagonisms fascinating . . . Its mealy inside machinations will be persuasive to anyone who has ever held a paper cup beneath a watercooler.”

—TIME

“Sheed is a crisp, witty and incisive writer on questions of mortality, failure, marriage, the meaningless friendships formed in offices, the quiet desperation of the second-rate, the tenuous relationships of the leading to those who are led.”

—Kirkus

“Wilfred Sheed’s jazzy prose is a joy to read.”

—Garrison Keillor

“Office Politics [is] reminiscent of the finest comic satires of . . . Kingsley [Amis], author of the incomparable Lucky Jim and Take a Girl Like You.”

—James T. Keane, America: The Jesuit Review

Wilfrid Sheed (1930–2011) was born in London, the son of the prominent Catholic publishers Sheed & Ward. Raised between London and Philadelphia, educated at Oxford, Sheed eventually moved to New York, where he became an editor and critic at the magazines Jubilee and Commonweal and later a columnist at the New York Times Book Review. A survivor of polio who wrote memoirs of his illness, and of his addictions to drugs and alcohol, he also published nine novels, several essay collections, and books on baseball and jazz.

Gerald Howard is a retired book editor whose essays and reviews have appeared in a variety of publications.  He is currently working on a biographical study of the editor and critic Malcolm Cowley.

Office Politics • Paperback ISBN: 9781961341180

Pub: Sep 10, 2024 • McNALLY EDITIONS no. 32

5" x 8.5" • 320 pages • $18.00

eBook ISBN: 9781946022721