A-one and a-two etc.

Taxmom favors me with the loan of her valued Christmas gift: a copy of Bruce Marshall's The Accounting (1958), hitherto unknown to me, and surely one of the few "accounting" novels ever written. Perhaps the only real competitor is Accounting for Murder, by the inimitable Emma Lathen, of whom I have written before, although the Lathen novel (and its kin) take a somewhat broader-brush view of the business world and its attendant evils.

There are, I guess, a few successful business novels although I'm having trouble thinking of examples that I would really want to read again: people always mention The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, which I have always studiously evaded. The late Arthur Hailey wrote a string of you-are-there novels about "the real world," as it is sometimes known. I read Wheels, about the auto industry and liked it well enough that I once assigned it to my commercial law students (they didn't see the point)--there are others, and I can't recall whether I ever read them or not. He also throws in the Godfather novels, greased with a happy face :-), but I'm not sure it is a joke. And speaking of the mob, if one were doing movies, I would surely put Casino near the head of the list.

There are, of course, a few reasonably successful novels about financial chicanery. The best that I know of is Christina Stead's House of All Nations (Amazon has a paperback on offer at $560.28) or perhaps Theodore Dreiser's Trilogy of Desire about the career of Charles Yerkes the mass transit guy. Or Trollope's The Way We Live Now--more keep coming to mind.

[My faithful readers, or reader, are/is saying--but aren't you forgetting Dickens? No, I am not forgetting Dickens; I am ignoring him. For all his maundering, Dickens seems to me to know next to nothing about the world of affairs, and to care even less.]

I suspect that I may be talking about nothing more than a special case of the more general rule that there aren't many good novels about work in any form--was it E. M. Forster who said that people in novels make love a lot more than people in real life, and work a lot less? People in discussions of this sort usually cite Life on the Mississipi, which is wonderful in its way, but not even a novel, and after that, where do you go next?

I've read a few of what to be "economics" novels that strike me as just dreadful (but cf. link). Taxmom and I would agree that accounting has its moments of excitement, although I admit it may be a challenge to get it down on the printed page. Still, there is promise in a beginning like this:

In 1933 the thirty-first of December fell on a Sunday, and so the cash count at theBank had to be done on the Saturday.

At half past nine that morning the auditors' senior London partner, Sir Eric Stugby-Wharton, F.C.A., walked into the offices of their Paris branch.

The only local partner at his desk was Morven, and his rough Scots voice could be heard bawling behind the closed door of his room "As usual, it's a pig's breakfast, Mr. Urquhart.

Sir Eric grinned with approval. The best way to train audit clerks was to shout at them. ...

Sir Eric Stugby-Wharton, you gotta love it...

Update: Joel is all over this one. He suggests Rise of Silas Lapham, about the Vermont merchant who discovers a paint mine. Good point. Also Moby Dick--but is this "business?" Or "work," a la Life on the Mississippi? Also Sinclair Lewis, but on this issue I'd put Babbitt and Main Street in a class with Dickens: I don't think Lewis knew much about business or business people except that he didn't like 'em. Joel also gives us a Google search with 28,700,000 hits, so I guess there is room for more research.

Update II Ignota says Balzac. Oh, dear me, yes, Balzac. They certainly are about scheming, hustling, positioning, etc. Oddly enough, I've probably read more novels by Bazlac than by any other author--testimony not so much of the degree in which I enjoy him as of the number he wrote. Of my exposure, I guess the one that comes closest to being a business novel per se is Histoire de la grandeur et de la décadence de César Birotteau--about the parfumier hornswoggled and bankrupted by an underling (and his own guileless incompetence).