#91: Employees First, Customers Second

Employees First, Customers Second: Turning Conventional Management Upside Down, by Vineet Nayar (Boston: Harvard Business Press, 2010)

Summary:
"When Vineet Nayar took the helm of HCL Technologies (HCLT) in 2005, the company's legacy of success was threatened by global shifts in the IT services market that left HCLT struggling to keep up with its bigger rivals. Five years later, the company had become one of the fastest growing IT services partners on the planet, world renowned for its radical management practices.

"What did HCLT do to effect such a transformation? As Nayar describes it in this refreshing first-person narrative, the secret to the company's success was to put employees first -- especially those working in the 'value zone,' described as the interface between the customer and HCLT. To do so, the company did not institute any employee-satisfaction programs, undertake any massive restructurings, or pursue any major technology initiatives. Instead, it employed a number of relatively simple catalysts that produced big (and often unexpected) results. The transformation advanced through four phases:

• Mirror Mirror: Nayar traveled around the world, bluntly speaking the truth about the company's situation and turning employees' eyes away from the past and toward a better future.
• Trust Through Transparency: A culture of trust was created by opening the books, sharing information that would make other companies cringe, and enabling employees and managers (including the CEO) to ask questions of each other.
• Inverting the Pyramid: The company redefined processes to make the supporting functions and the management accountable to the employees -- who, as a result, both improved their effectiveness and built new passion for their work.
• Recasting the Role of the CEO: Nayar sought to transform the company into a self-governing organization by transferring the responsibility for change from the office of the CEO to the employees in the value zone.

Nayar candidly admits that he did not have a grand plan when he started out, and that these phases became clear to him only after the transformation, but argues that any of these ideas and practices -- 'the world's most modern management,' according to Fortune -- may be successfully adopted by any company in any industry anywhere in the world, with similar results."

Table of Contents:

• Introduction
• 1. Mirror Mirror: Creating the Need for Change
• 2. Trust Through Transparency: Creating a Culture of Change
• 3. Inverting the Organizational Pyramid: Building a Structure for Change
• 4. Recasting the Role of the CEO: Transferring the Responsibility for Change
• 5. Find Understanding in Misunderstanding: Renewing the Cycle of Change

My Take:
Wow. While this isn't my favorite genre, I've certainly read enough in the leadership and management section to have a sense of what to expect, and honestly, my expectations aren't usually all that high. A valuable reminder or two, perhaps even some point I hadn't thought of before, but usually nothing earth-shattering.

Employees First, Customers Second was different, probably in large part because its author isn't some ill-defined management guru but an actual CEO who (if the book can be believed) transformed his company by implementing four simple but revolutionary steps, all of which flow from the premise that a business's true value in the 21st century derives not from the R&D or manufacturing divisions, but from the front-line employees who interact most directly with the customers:

"The conventional wisdom, of course, says that companies must always put the customer first. In any service business, however, the true value is created in the interface between the customer and the employee. So, by putting employees first, you can bring about fundamental change in the way a company creates and delivers unique value for its customers and differentiates itself from its competitors. Through a combination of engaged employees and accountable management, a company can create extraordinary value for itself, its customer, and the individuals involved in both companies."

The Mirror, Mirror section is pretty straightforward and, while it may not be common among new CEOs, it's certainly not unheard of. Remember the old MBWA (Management By Walking Around) fad from 20-some-odd years ago? Well, essentially, this is what Nayar did on becoming CEO: traveled around the world, met with employees at most or all of HCLT's many locations, and told them the truth as he saw it about where the company currently stood. In his case, this meant admitting that the firm that had previously been an industry leader in India had fallen in the early 2000s to the middle of the pack, and continued to lose market share by resting on its laurels. This chapter concludes with an insightful and humorous observation on what it really means to be a great leader:

"I thought about my three heroes -- Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, and Martin Luther King Jr. -- and how they had created transformation in their societies. ... These great leaders did not formulate strategy by retreating with their top people to a private place and then emerging to make a pronouncement to the masses. No, they walked the roads of their countries, met their people, and talked with them ceaselessly. During that process, they held up the mirror to their societies and helped their people see and articulate what was wrong. The leaders were able to make people intrinsically unhappy with the current state of affairs without demeaning their accomplishments or dishonoring their past in anyway. ... They also worked with their people to create an idea of the future, the point B that made people aspire to change. The resulting combination of dissatisfaction, continued pride, and excitement was a very, very heady potion and difficult to reject."

It's in the next section where things start to really get radical, though. Believing that in order to successfully implement major changes and innovations, all ideas, no matter where they come from within the company, need to be aired and debated, he opened up HCLT's financial information to everyone in the organization. (Exactly what was and wasn't made public wasn't specified, but I'm enough of a privacy-mad American to assume individual salaries weren't published. Hey, who knows?) He also initiated an online Q & A forum different from many others in that questions weren't censored; all questions were visible to everyone, along with all the responses. Interestingly, while the deluge of questions and comments initially made Nayar feel like the company must be in serious trouble, his direct reports indicated that they were seeing a very different picture; now that the company seemed to be acknowledging and addressing its problems, employees were spending much less time gossiping and more time talking about what was being posted, offering one another different ways of looking at situations, working on potential solutions, etc.

From here, he went on to do what the book calls inverting the pyramid: making such "enabling functions" as HR and finance, and even the CEO's office, accountable to the front-line employees. Specifically, they instituted an internal service ticket function that works like this:

"An employee can open a ticket for one of three categories of issues -- a problem, a query, or a work request -- and the ticket can be directed to any one of the enabling functions, including HR, finance, administration, training and development, IT/IS teams, transport, and others. Employees can also open a ticket on most members of senior management, including me.

"Once the employee has filled out the ticket, the system automatically assigns it to a support executive in the appropriate department. He or she will investigate the issue and take any action necessary to resolve it. The support executive commits to a set of accountability measures for each ticket, including how long it should take to complete. The metrics are based on a number of factors, including the complexity and urgency of the request. If the support executive does not resolve the issue within the specified time, the ticket is automatically sent to the executive's manager, and so on up the line.

"The entire SSD process is transparent so that an employee can check the status of his or her ticket at any time. Once the issue is resolved, the support executive closes the ticket. If, however, the employee is not satisfied with the resolution, he or she can refuse the closed status of the ticket. It will remain open and the clock will keep ticking. The employee can also rate the quality of service provided by the support executive."

In addition, the company extended the 360-degree feedback process many companies use to allow not just a manager's direct reports, but anyone whose job might be influenced by a manager's actions, to offer feedback on that manager.

The final action step -- recasting the role of the CEO -- was a bit unclear to me, but essentially, Nayar envisioned HCLT as a leaderless organization, as described in Brafman and Beckstrom's The Starfish and the Spider:

"Cut off the leg of a spider, and you have a seven-legged creature on your hands; cut off its head and you have a dead spider. But cut off the arm of a starfish and it will grow a new one. Not only that, but the severed arm can grow an entirely new body."

Perhaps the best summary of the leadership model for which Nayar strives is this one, from the end of Chapter 5:

"The CEO can no longer be the one who scribbles strategy on a paper napkin over dinner. He or she cannot be the one who stands in front of a crowd to motivate it with fabulous oratory. The CEO will not be the one who thinks of the best and the brightest ideas. The role of the CEO is to enable people to excel, help them discover their own wisdom, engage themselves entirely in their work, and accept responsibility for making change."

The book's final chapter addresses some of the more common objections one might have to the EFCS philosophy; namely, that it won't work when times are hard and isn't necessary when times are good; that customers won't see any value as a result; that large-scale changes are needed; or that EFCS has no impact on the company's bottom line. (Needless to say, he suggests that all 5 comments are untrue.)

If it's not already obvious, I really enjoyed this book; it was a quick, easy read with a lot to chew on for a manager or aspiring manager of pretty much any organization.

#84: Hedge Fund Wives

Hedge Fund Wives, by Tatiana Boncompagni (New York: Avon, 2009)

Summary:
"When her husband, John, is recruited to be a big-time hedge fund manager, Marcy Emerson gives up her job, uproots her life, and moves from Chicago to New York City. But try as she might, March is never going to fit into one of the supposed seven categories of Hedge Fund Wives -- the Accidental, the Westminster, the Stephanie Seymour, the Former Secretary, the Socialite, the Workaholic, or the Breeder -- especially when behind every smile may lurk a stab in the back.

"In a perfect world John would have been there to help her navigate the waters, but in this volatile financial market, relationships have a way of nosediving faster than the Dow, and March quickly finds herself tossed aside for a thinner, blonder model. But while living out of suitcases and drowning her sorrows in cocktails, Marcy realizes it's time to get back up on her own two feet again ... and fight for those things in life that are far more important than money."

Opening Line:
"When I first opened the invitation to Caroline Reinhardt's baby shower, I thought I'd received it by mistake."

My Take:
Polished this off in half a day, and I feel as though I just had a big bowl of popcorn for supper. It's fun and tasty in the short term, partly because you feel like you're getting away with something, but doesn't do much to nourish or sustain you over the long haul.

The back-of-the-jacket blurb pretty much sums up the story line. Marcy, our heroine and narrator, is established as a fish out of water from the get-go, starting with the first-chapter sequence in which her pink parka stands out like a sore thumb amid a coat closet full of furs, and Caroline Reinhardt decides she's not worth talking to because she doesn't hire an interior decorator. At John's insistence, she'd given up her own banking career in anticipation of one day staying at home with their children, but after a recent miscarriage and the move to Manhattan, she's still reeling. It doesn't help that the other hedge fund wives, whether employed in their own right or not, seem interested primarily in extreme competitive shopping.

She does meet the glamorous but warm, if a little high-strung, Jill at the aforementioned baby shower, and through her, eventually meets Gigi, a caterer and cookbook author who (despite her marriage to yet another Wall St. VIP) becomes her closest friend and confidante. She and John also begin to socialize with Ainsley and Peter, despite that couple's precarious finances. As is telegraphed early on, this is where the trouble begins; Ainsley, panicked at Peter's fortune and aware of John's rising-star status, decides to trade up, and when Marcy spontaneously flies to Miami to visit John at a conference, she catches the pair in flagrante. With the help of a tough divorce lawyer Gina recommends, Marcy resists John's early settlement offers and ultimately walks away with a cool $15 million ... just in time to see Ainsley's pregnancy in the society pages, and realize how long her affair with John had been going on.

Marcy eventually comes out on top, and John does get a comeuppance of sorts, but this is no First Wives Club. It's far shorter on humor, and rather excessive in the descriptions of conspicuous consumption. (The excess is the point, I know, but it still makes for tedious reading after yet another over-the-top baby shower or dinner party.) All in all, an OK read, but I'd have liked a bit less of the bling, and more exploration of the edge-of-recession era in which the story is set.

#83: Original Sins

Original Sins, by Peg Kingman (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2010)

Summary:
"Why would a runaway Virginia slave -- having built a rewarding life in the East Indies as a silk merchant -- risk her own freedom and that of her two sons by returning to America in 1840, eighteen years after taking her freedom? Annie -- now Anibaddh Lyngdoh -- claims that she intends to introduce a new kind of silk to the floundering American silk industry. But her true reason, as discovered by her old friend Grace MacDonald Pollocke, is far more personal -- to find the child she abandoned when she ran away.

"Grace, orphaned in early childhood, has grown up in India and China with her stepmother. She is now married, has a young son of her own, and is a portrait painter living in Philadelphia. Anibaddh cannot safely travel south, and so Grace goes in her place. The investigation leads her to the Virginia plantation where Annie was raised in slavery and where Grace's own cousins live. There old sins are discovered, and new ones committed. What crimes may be justified, Grace wonders, in the service of a higher justice? Deceit, forgery, fraud, perjury ... even murder?

"This novel thrillingly evokes a nineteenth-century America not so different from the present_ a time of stunning new technologies and financial collapse, and when religious and racial views collide with avowed principles of morality and law."

Opening Line:
"Grace had imagined Daniel's homecoming hundreds of times; repeatedly she had painted the scene in her mind's eye."

My Take:
A bit of a slow starter, but surprisingly engaging once it got going.

As the opening line above suggests, the story opens with Grace eagerly awaiting her husband's arrival from Canton, where they met and married. A few chapters in, he arrives, with a surprise guest: Anibaddh Lyngdoh, who hasn't set foot on American soil since escaping from slavery and preventing eight-year-old Grace from being kidnapped by her mother's relatives in Scotland 18 years earlier. While Anibaddh claims to be here only briefly, to introduce her silks to the American market before delivering her sons to school in Europe, the astute Grace quickly notices that she seems to be making plans for a much longer stay ... and deduces, based on Anibaddh's hints and her own devotion to her baby son Jamie, that she's really come back to find and free Diana, the daughter she left behind in Virginia almost two decades ago.

The plot thickens considerably when Anibaddh recognizes one of Grace's "sitters" (portrait-painting customers), Mrs. Ambler, and the sister who accompanies her, Mrs. MacFarlane, as none other than the Grants, her own former owners and Grace's cousins. This revelation leads Grace to accept the sisters' invitation to come home to Virginia with them; under the guise of painting portraits of the whole family and attending a much-anticipated religious camp meeting, Grace will try to find Diana and send word back to Anibaddh. She keeps her maiden name a secret, and for the most part, finds the sisters and their mutual aunt, Bella Johnstone, to be insufferable pieces of work -- though she does find an unexpected ally in the youngest, unmarried Grant sister, aspiring chemist Julia, and is surprised to find herself coming to love their father (and her uncle), Judge Grant, an old man suffering from severe kidney stones. More surprising still, she discovers at the camp meeting that the elder Mr. MacFarlane, father of Mrs. MacFarlane's abusive husband, is also a kindred spirit ... at least when it comes to religious views, or lack thereof.

Then all hell breaks loose. On the same night, Diana runs away, and Judge Grant dies. The family is in an uproar when it's revealed that the Judge had been trustee for his late sister's estate, of which that ungrateful Scottish niece who refused to come to Virgina all those years ago is the sole beneficiary. Some debate ensures as to whether it's worth trying to find her or not, though the question is of little practical consequences; over the last few years, it seems the trust just happened to be invested in the horses that died and the slaves who'd run away or become too old to work, so what should have been worth $2,000 is only about $25. Enraged by the direction the conversation has taken, Grace fesses up and admits that she herself is the former Grace MacDonald, and the beneficiary of the trust. Not surprisingly, this does not go over well, and she ends up walking the 20-odd miles to Alexandria to catch a train home. The story doesn't end here, however, and the legal maneuvers that ensue have enormous repercussions not just for Grace, but for Anibaddh and her family.

At first, I had some reservations about telling a story about slavery from the point of view of a white, Scottish woman. I eventually got over them; by the end of the book, it seems that Kingman may have done this to make Grace (and through her, the average white reader) question our own complicity in maintaining slavery for so long, even if we might believe we're innocent. I also give the author props for setting the story not during the Civil War, which seems more typical for this subject, but 20 years earlier, when there wasn't really any question of ending slavery throughout the whole country.

Probably my biggest complaint about the book is twofold: too many unnecessary details, and too many red herrings. Kingman spends way too much time on Anibaddh's silkworms, describing their appearance and how they're raised for pages on end sometimes. Brief background and texture I understand, but it's taken to an extent that makes you think it will end up significant to the plot (which it never really does). Likewise, there are a handful of clues dropped early on that never amount to anything. Have the disgruntled slaves actually been poisoning their employers with castor oil beans? Is the senior MacFarlane really playing bagpipes in his moonlit field just for the heck of it, or is he secretly signaling to someone on the Underground Railroad? The story would still work perfectly well without either plot line, but to have them introduced and then inexplicably abandoned is perplexing.

Still a book I'd recommend, if you enjoy historical fiction set in the 19th century US.

#82: Dead or Alive

Dead or Alive, by Tom Clancy with Grant Blackwood (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2010)

Summary:
"After almost a decade, Tom Clancy -- the acknowledged master of international intrigue and nonstop military action -- returns to the world he knows better than anyone: a world of chaos, caught in the crossfire of politics and power, placed on the edge of annihilation by evil men.

"But there are other men who are honor-bound to stop the bloodshed and protect their homeland-- by any means necessary ...

"It is called the Campus. It was secretly created under the administration of President Jack Ryan, its sole purpose to hunt down, locate, and eliminate terrorists and those who protect them, at will, without sanction or oversight. A self-sufficient entity, it has no official connection to the American government -- a necessity in a time when those in power consider themselves above such arcane concepts as loyalty, justice, and right or wrong.

"Covert intelligence expert Jack Ryan Jr. and his compatriots at the campus have waged this silent war in every corner of the world. Now joined by two of his father's closest allies, black ops warriors John Clark and 'Ding' Chavez, as well as Brian and Dominic Caruso and Mary Pat Foley, the campus has come up against its greatest foe: a sadistic killer known as the Emir.

"The mastermind of countless horrific attacks, the Emir has eluded capture by every law enforcement agency in the world -- a fact that the Campus is determined to change. But his greatest devastation is yet to be unleashed, as he plans a monumental single strike that will destroy the heart of America, unless the Campus can take him, dead or alive.

"On the trail of the emir, Jack Ryan Jr. will find himself following in his legendary father's footsteps on a deadly manhunt that will take him and his allies around the globe, into the shadowy arenas of political gamesmanship, and back onto U.S. soil -- in a battle to prevent the fall of the West ...

"Together for the first time, an all-star cast of Tom Clancy's characters races to ensure the nation's survival and to complete their mission, the desperate search for a madman who may be hiding in plain sight."

Opening Line:
"Light troops -- an Eleven-Bravo light infantryman, according to the United States Army's MOS (military occupational specialty) system -- are supposed to be 'pretty' spit-and-polish troops with spotless uniforms and clean-shaven faces, but First Sergeant Sam Driscoll wasn't one of those anymore, and hadn't been for some time."

My Take:
See, not all my light, entertaining reading is gender-specific!

Sigh. Yeah, it's a Clancy novel ... much like the Danielle Steel fluff I read a few weeks back, you pretty much know what you're getting into when you pick it up (though the specifics are quite a bit different). I could never get that into Jack Ryan's character, and his son doesn't interest me all that much, either, but I have had a big old book-character crush on John Clark ever since I read Without Remorse and Clear and Present Danger way back in the day, and couldn't resist the chance to read about how he and colleague/ son-in-law Domingo Chavez captured Osama bin Laden. (OK, Clancy calls his uber-bad guy Saif Rahman Yasin, dba the Emir, but he's obviously based on bin Laden -- right down to the responsibility for 9/11 and the ties to the Saudi royal family.)

As I'd expected, the complaints I've had about previous Clancy novels still hold for this one. I can never tell if Clancy himself doesn't like women or he's just giving his predominantly male readers what they want, but his stories take place in an almost exclusively masculine universe. With the exception of the no-nonsense, CIA veteran Mary Pat Foley, who plays a bit part here that would land her name just above the stunt doubles if this were made into a movie, only three female characters grace Dead or Alive's 950 pages -- two call girls, and one teenaged Indonesian terrorist. (Clark and Chavez's wives and the way-in-over-her-head National Security Advisor, none of whom actually say anything, don't count.) I'm not looking for a 50/50 split, but come on, now.

Clancy's more recent books also seem to suffer from what I think of as the J.K. Rowling problem: a tendency of famous, successful authors to decide that they don't need no stinkin' editors and will bloat their texts as much as they darned well please, TYVM. Usually, half the fun of a Clancy novel is seeing how the umpteen seemingly disconnected threads are going to come together at the end, but here the author's given us way too much of a good thing. There's the poorly-secured, former Soviet nuclear stockpile; good soldier Driscoll's being railroaded for murder by some Washington desk jockey who has the President's ear; the Indonesia as terrorist petri dish angle; the plot to blow up a Midwestern church ... ugh, I get tired and confused just trying to remember what all the ancillary story lines are. I don't mind so much if and when I can guess at an author's politics from reading his novels, but having it simultaneously flash a neon sign in my face, club me over the head, and stuff itself down my throat is a bit much.

Meh. As with several other authors, I may well read other Clancy books I haven't yet bothered with, if they present themselves ... but I think the author's Clear and Present Danger days are behind him.

#81: Chosen

Chosen, by Chandra Hoffman (New York: Harper, 2010)

Summary:
"It all begins with a fantasy: the caseworker in her 'signing paperwork' charcoal suit standing alongside beaming parents cradling their adopted newborn, set against a fluorescent-lit delivery-room backdrop. It's this blissful picture that keeps Chloe Pinter, director of the Chosen Child's domestic-adoption program, happy while juggling the high demands of her boss and the incessant needs of both adoptive and biological parents.

"But the very job that offers her refuge from her turbulent personal life and Portland's winter rains soon becomes a battleground involving three very different couples: the Novas, well-off college sweethearts who suffered fertility problems but are now expecting their own baby; the McAdoos, a wealthy husband and desperate wife for whom adoption is a last chance; and Jason and Penny, an impoverished couple who have nothing -- except the baby everyone wants. When a child goes missing, dreams dissolve into nightmares, and everyone is forced to examine what he or she really wants and where it all went wrong."

Opening Line:
"Chloe Pinter is trying to develop a taste for coffee."

My Take:
A not-too-silly fun read; no more, no less. What makes it more compelling than it might otherwise be is its subject matter; I've read plenty of chick lit about pregnancy and new parenthood, but don't remember any other fiction about the domestic adoption scene. The details here are interesting; sometimes funny, sometimes a bit sketchy if they're legit, which I suspect they are -- Hoffman's bio includes a stint as the director of a U.S. adoption program.

For the most part, the picture Chosen paints of birth parents isn't a flattering one. Jason and Penny, whose newborn son Francie and John McAdoo adopt, are not only poor, but ex-cons, and while we might forgive Penny (herself the victim of a heinous rape and assault long before the book opens) her single conviction for check fraud, Jason is a career criminal and sociopath. Most of the other birth parents Chloe and her clients reflect upon aren't quite this bad, but are nonetheless out to milk the system for all it's worth. Not long after Eva Nova gives birth to her own son, she muses about what might have become of Amber, the birth mother whose daughter she and husband Paul had hoped to adopt before Eva became pregnant:

"[A] year earlier, Amber, a pudgy thirteen-year-old birth mother, her own mother only twenty-eight, had chosen the Novas as the adoptive parents for her own baby. Chloe Pinter had arranged their first meeting at a Red Lobster, an obese pair of slow-blinking, loud-chewing women. Paul's tounge-tied comment, 'You could be sisters,' had offended them equally. They had strung the agency along for six months, huge expensive meals, dragging Chloe through the grocery store for hours. Chloe told Eva and Paul that Amber and her mother had each pushed a cart filled with Doritos, jumbo boxes of Froot Loops, doughnuts, crumb cakes."

At the same time, Paul muses silently that they're way better off without Amber's baby:

"It had surprised him how quickly he had gotten on board with the concept of adoption. ... But when adoption was presented in the specific, in the form of the gum-smacking Amber, Paul can admit to himself that he was shaken. He had felt such relief when it was over, no longer worried about their half-wit, sleepy-eyed Baby Huey of a daughter who would be knocked up at age twelve herself, nature's triumph over nurture."

Later, Chloe has an excruciating lunch meeting with Debra, a pregnant exotic dancer who boasts "two kids at home, two adopted out, and a couple I knew early enough about to take care of," admits to not just drinking alcohol but taking crystal meth during her pregnancy, and insists that she be paid enough to take her kids to Disneyland after the baby is born. If it weren't for Heather, the Good Birth Mom who happens to live near Penny and Jason, this would seem a little classist; as it is, it just kinda makes you wonder.

The adoptive parents fare a bit better in Hoffman's hands, but their portrayal isn't exactly glowing, either. The Novas are mostly decent people (sure, Eva struggles with postpartum depression after Wyeth's birth, and Paul comes this close to an affair), but the McAdoos, not so much; Francie seems way more interested in maintaining her online friendships and picking out the perfect nursery furniture than actually spending time with her new son, and John's frequent business trips to Singapore eventually prove to be a cover for other, less family-friendly hobbies.

Oddly, probably the one character who seemed least real or interesting to me was the main character, Chloe. I do appreciate that her relationship with boyfriend Dan is a complicated one, neither perfect nor across-the-board awful. Sure, they met cute/ slutty and moved in together way too soon; yes, Dan's dream of starting his own surfing business in Hawaii seems a little impulsive ... but Hoffman avoids presenting him as a complete ass, too. I'm not 100% thrilled with how their story line wraps up -- let's just say it involves some abrupt changes in personalities and priorities that didn't quite ring true to me -- but this didn't prevent me from mostly enjoying the book.

#80: The White Devil

The White Devil, by Justin Evans (New York: Harper, 2011)

Summary:
"The Harrow School is home to privileged adolescents known as much for their distinctive dress and traditions as for their arrogance and schoolboy cruelty. Seventeen-year-old Andrew Taylor is enrolled in the esteemed British institution by his father, who hopes that the school's discipline will put some distance between his son and his troubled past in the States.

"But trouble -- and danger -- seem to follow Andrew. When one of his schoolmates and friends dies mysteriously of a severe pulmonary illness, Andrew is blamed and is soon an outcast, spurned by nearly all his peers. And there is the pale, strange boy who begins to visit him at night. Either Andrew is losing his mind, or the house legend about his dormitory being haunted is true.

"When the school's poet-in-residence, Piers Fawkes, is commissioned to write a play about Byron, one of Harrow's most famous alumni, he casts Andrew in the title role. Andrew begins to discover uncanny links between himself and the renowned poet. In his loneliness and isolation, Andrew becomes obsessed with Lord Byron's story and the poet's status not only as a literary genius and infamous seducer but as a student at the very different Harrow of two centuries prior -- a place rife with violence, squalor, incurable diseases, and tormented love affairs.

"When frightening and tragic events from that long-ago past start to recur in Harrow's present, and when the dark and deadly specter by whom Andrew's been haunted seems to be all too real, Andrew is forced to solve a two-hundred-year-old literary mystery that threatens the lives of his friends and his teachers -- and, most terrifyingly, his own."

Opening Lines:
"Outside a cool evening awaited. The perspiration on his back and neck turned icy."

My Take:
Halfway through and still trying to decide. Got off to a slow start -- Gothic fiction isn't usually my thing -- but I do like stories set in school settings and it is picking up a bit. TBA.

(Later) Decent as those things go, but as I said, Gothic fiction isn't really my bag, and I don't know that this book was enough to win me over to the genre. Oh well; nothing wrong with expanding one's literary horizons.

As noted above, the book's opening is fairly unremarkable, with Andrew arriving at Harrow as a brand-new sixth-former (senior) feeling like he's stepped into a wholly alien world. The sole American at a British boarding school, and a rare transfer where most students begin as shells (seventh graders), Andrew does not make friends quickly -- not to mention that the rumors about his expulsion from his last school for drug use have crossed the pond with impressive speed. Only dorm-mate Theo Ryder is at all friendly or welcoming to Andrew, and within a few days, Theo is found dead. Contrary to the jacket blurb above, Andrew isn't blamed for Theo's death at this point, and the remaining residents of the Lot (Andrew's and formerly, Theo's house, or dorm) continue their studies, shaken but not really permanently changed.

Or so they think. What Andrew can't tell anyone at first, for fear of being deemed crazy and sent home, is that he not only found Theo's body ... he saw him die, strangled by a mysterious, white-haired boy who was there one moment and (without running away) simply gone the next. When the autopsy attributes Theo's death to a rare but non-contagious lung disease, he tries to put the vision from his mind. At the same time, Harrow's poet-in-residence and Lot's housemaster, Piers Fawkes, has been commissioned to write a play about Harrow's most famous alum, Lord Byron ... to whom Andrew bears an uncanny resemblance. Andrew is cast in the lead role, and begins to forge tentative, unlikely friendships with both Fawkes and the school's sole female student, headmaster's daughter Persephone Vine.

Unfortunately, the spectral white-haired boy doesn't give up that easily. Late one night, Andrew sees him a second time, when the boy leads him to a prefect's bathroom in the Harrow of yore, where a perplexed Andrew prevents him from being raped by a gang of older, larger students. Later, he recites a bizarre verse which Andrew learns (with the help of Fawkes and the school's archivist, Judith Kahn) comes from an obscure Jacobean tragedy performed at Harrow some 200 years earlier. This coincidence convinces the skeptical Fawkes that Andrew's ghost isn't just in his head, and the two become engrossed in discovering who he is and what he wants.

Until two more students fall ill, with symptoms similar to Theo's ... but which now, on closer examination, seem to indicate TB. This ratchets up the urgency and publicity of their search, especially as one of the students is Persephone.

From here on out, the book does get considerably more gripping and hard to put down. Though I'm not typically a fan of ghost stories, I did enjoy the climax and resolution of this one. If you like boarding school novels with a touch of the supernatural, give this one a try.

#79: Sunset Park

Sunset Park, by Paul Auster (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2010)

(Would actually have been #77, but I left it home on my recent trip to LI and took Bonobo Handshake and The Arrivals instead.)

Summary:
Sunset Park follows the hopes and fears of a cast of unforgettable characters brought together by the mysterious Miles Heller during the dark months of the 2008 economic collapse.

• An enigmatic young man employed as a trash-out worker in southern Florida obsessively photographing thousands of abandoned objects left behind by the evicted families.
• A group of young people squatting in a house in Sunset Park, Brooklyn.
• The Hospital for Broken Things, which specializes in repairing the artifacts of a vanished world.
• William Wyler's 1946 classic The Best Years of Our Lives.
• A celebrated actress preparing to return to Broadway.
• An independent publisher desperately trying to save his business and his marriage.

These are just some of the elements Auster magically weaves together in this immensely moving novel about contemporary America and its ghosts. Sunset Park confirms Paul Auster as one of our greatest living writers."

Opening Line:
"For almost a year now, he has been taking photographs of abandoned things."

My Take:
Made an interesting discovery with this one. After noting last week that Sunset Park was "interesting from a literary point of view, but [hadn't] grabbed me from either a plot or character perspective," and getting to that point halfway into the book where it's neither so great you're tearing through the pages nor so bad you give up altogether, I tried something different: I read it out loud. Not all of it, mind you; just a chapter here and there when I was home by myself or while MrHazel and Twig were otherwise engaged (i.e., watching Doctor Who on Netflix).

Amazing the difference this made. As I initially suspected, Sunset Park is literary fiction, rather than something you read primarily for the plot. (Yeah, I know they're not mutually exclusive, but humor me for a minute.) Not much of consequence happens here; essentially, four twenty-somethings squat in an abandoned Brooklyn townhouse for a few months until they finally get evicted. The characters are realistic and multifaceted, but all incredibly self-absorbed and not particularly likeable: Miles, the college dropout who abandoned his father and stepmother seven years ago, and has returned to New York from Florida only to escape possible prosecution for his relationship with his high school girlfriend; Bing, the old school friend who runs the Hospital for Broken Things and secretly keeps Miles' father informed of his son's whereabouts; Alice, the perpetual grad student who finds her part-time job promoting writers' free speech far more compelling than her almost-but-not-quite-done dissertation; and Ellen, the artist whose erotic drawings provide perhaps her sole sexual outlet, given that her obsession with Miles seems doomed to remain unrequited.

But for all that there's not much of a plot here and the characters remind you of that annoying special snowflake co-worker or college dorm-mate we've all known now and again, Sunset Park has a lot to say. Much as I had the odd, life-imitates-art experience a few weeks ago of reading The Confession while the Troy Davis case was in the news, I couldn't help thinking that the Sunset Park squatters' lives of quiet desperation, seeking meaningful work and lives in a society that renders us anonymous and interchangeable, parallel the frustrations that, collectively, gave rise to the Occupy Wall Street protests and the earlier Arab Spring demonstrations. Alice has given up on adjuncting, which requires at least a full-time effort for a salary that works out to be something around minimum wage; Miles has worked here and there as a cook and trash-out worker before Bing gives him a make-work job out of kindness. All four principals are at once determined to make or be something of significance, and utterly in despair of ever succeeding. I don't know that I'd go so far as to say I loved this book, or that it's one of my favorites, but it definitely offered some interesting things to think about and a compelling but disturbing vision of contemporary American youth and culture.