Company

By: Max Barry

Narrated by: William Dufris

Length: 10 hrs and 15 mins

Publisher's summary

Nestled among Seattle's skyscrapers, The Zephyr Holdings Building is a bleak rectangle topped by an orange-and-black logo that gives no hint of Zephyr's business. Lack of clarity, it turns out, is Zephyr's defining characteristic. The floors are numbered in reverse. No one has ever seen the CEO or glimpsed his office on the first (i.e., top) floor. Yet every day people clip on their ID tags, file into the building, sit at their desks, and hope that they're not about to be outsourced.

Stephen Jones, a young recruit with shoes so new they squeak, reports for his first day in the Training Sales Department and finds it gripped by a crisis involving the theft of a donut. In short order, the guilty party is identified and banished from the premises and Stephen is promoted from assistant to sales rep. He does his best to fit in with his fellow workers, among them a gorgeous receptionist who earns more than anyone else, and a sales rep who's so emotionally involved with her job that she uses relationship books as sales manuals, but Stephen is nagged by a feeling that the company is hiding something. Something that explains why when people are fired, they are never heard from again; why every manager has a copy of the Omega Management System; and most of all, why nobody in the company knows what it does.

©2006 Max Barry (P)2006 Tantor Media, Inc.

Critic reviews

• Audie Award Finalist, Humor, 2007

"Mr. Barry is a deft and focused satirist, and his sense of business ethics is right on the money." (The New York Times)
"[Barry's] at his funniest lampooning the suits that tread the stage, consumed by the sound and fury of office politics that signify nothing." (Publishers Weekly)

Can Relate to Company

I liked the story (I personally can relate to many of the ridiculous situations). I also thought the narrator did a great job with each character.

Realized I am living in this fiction!

Very interesting, and make me laugh at my own corporate life!
Great reader as well.

Nice Story, but Horrible, Rushed Ending

What would have made Company better?

This really was a nice story and was quite entertaining, however the ending to the book felt rushed compared to the rest of the story. It felt like the ending was wrote by a totally different author.

the reader doesn't get it

I loved Jennifer Government, which I read, and didn't like Company, to which I listened. I suspect the difference is not in Max Barry, the author, but in the reader. He misses the character of the book - ironic and deadpan - and instead reads it as though he were auditioning for I Love Lucy. Big lines, big emphasis, big big big. All too big. Maybe he should catch Weeds.

a better read than a listen

"Company" seems like it might be a fun read, but the audio production spoils it. The narrator lays it on thick, which makes this light satire seem almost unbearably cute. He also coughs and laughs and makes other guttural noises during character dialogue, even when the text doesn't specifically call for it. If that wasn't enough, conversations on the speaker phone, voice-mails, and even people yelling in the hallway get special sound effects. This is less of an unabridged read than it is a one-man show. Most audiobook listeners would be better off reading this one themselves.

A good read ruined

I started reading a friend's copy of Company randomly. I enjoyed the first 100 pages so much that I plunked down my money on the audible version. What a mistake. The problem was not the book but rather the narration. The voices are so overdone and ridiculous that the book is rendered unlistenable. All of the biting, subtle, satire is completely lost as the reader hits you over the head with his interpretation of the characters. Save your Audible credits on this one and pick up the hardcopy.

only made it half-way

Having belonged to Audible since 2003, I have listened to dozens of books. In most cases, I have made it all the way through--I find a book has to be pretty bad for me to give up. This was one of those books! I am not familiar with the author's work, so I can't say if it was the story or the narration, but I suspect it was a combination of both. The narration was annoying (I agree with the reviewer who wrote that it sounded like the narrator was auditioning for "I Love Lucy")---it tried to add too much, thereby masking the irony that the story was meant to convey. In addition the story itself was slow moving, perhaps an abridgement would be the answer. I would stay away from this book!

Not worth the time

I like my books to be entertaining, interesting, exciting, funny, or thrilling. This book was none of those. I like to give books a chance to get going, so 4 or 5 hours into the book the hero finally escaped from the rat race and did something exciting. Unfortunately that only lasted 20 min or so and then it went back to the same old thing. If you like reading about workers acting like rats in a cage while the company execs manipulate them to see how they will react, this book may be something you would like, otherwise don't waste your time. I gave it a fair chance, 7 hours, but psychological manipulation just isn't something I enjoy.

vapid, sophomoric, cliched sorry I purchased

waited too long so could not return it but its just cliched unoriginal humor poorly narrated.

boring dribble

I love this author, so this was a huge letdown- bad calmly a bunch of annoying boring characters at a pointless job.