Kirn is trying to create the New Economy Babbitt, the perpetual haunter of first class and airport bars. On the periphery of Ryan's consciousness is his sister Julie's upcoming wedding, but his disconnection from his family is evident. His most important and hush-hush project is to jump ship to MythTech, a mysterious Omaha company renowned for its esoteric management consulting. He also wants to market Sandor Pinter, a Peter Drucker–like management guru, through posters, coffee cups and the usual familiar detritus of pop culture. He's written a business allegory, for one thing, which he hopes to place with a management science publisher. His ultimate goal is accumulating one million frequent flier miles, but he has a few other projects he hasn't told headquarters about. In this world, being fired has been euphemized into "career transition." Ryan Bingham is a career transition counselor for a firm based in Denver.
The message of Kirn's new novel is that the "dark Satanic mills" that power the capitalist system no longer run on the sweat of the laboring masses-they are now fueled by the hot air of the therapeutic-industrial complex, that weird construct made of a thousand management strategy companies and their attendant conferences.
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