Ted Heller's debut novel is set in a publishing house. A veteran of the New York magazine scene, Heller's main character, Zachary Post is a fraud, "a mythomaniac", whose CV is a work of fiction. He struggles to hold onto his job when all around him are prepared to lie, cheat and/or double-cross their way up the ladder at It, the shallow, glossy magazine where he fails to make an impression. Slabrat portrays the office as a microcosm of real life, where survival of the fittest takes on Orwellian overtones. Inter-office politics and rivalries compete with gamesmanship and favouritism as the vice du jour. Employee is deliberately set against employee and indoctrination into the It way of doing things means shedding your real skin for the faux fur of success - "a rat's gotta do what a rat's gotta do". The book's most interesting aspect is the veiled references to the big American glossies that Heller, son of Catch 22 author Joseph Heller, has contributed to: Spy, Details, Premiere and Vanity Fair. It's about a hundred pages too long and by mid-way you're past caring whether Post loses his job or not.
Heralded as a "brilliant, biting black comedy" that "will touch a nerve with anyone who has ever dipped a toe into the shark infested waters of office politics", it's a lot of laughs short of entertaining.. There are pale shades of Douglas Copeland and Bret Easton Ellis but rather than revelling in the voyeurism, you're subjected to pretension layered upon pretension. The end result: a read that ignores the tongue-in-cheek values of Absolutely Fabulous's Patsey and Edwina and simply bores you rigid.
Alanna Gallagher is editor of In Dublin magazine.
