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Product Description
Zachary Arlen Post is a fraud. A lazy but ambitious magazine editor who toils in one of New York's skyscrapers, or 'slabs', Zachary is struggling to work his way up the masthead of It, the shallow, glossy magazine at which he's an associate editor. But his ascent has stalled: he can't seem to get promoted. So when determined new boy Mark Larkin begins to get himself noticed and promoted, Zachary realises that something must be done. Mark must be destroyed . . .'Heller's satire on American magazine journalism is written to the same high standard as his father's first novel, Catch-22 . . . this is the funniest and sharpest novel about journalism since Jay Mclnerney's Bright Lights, Big City Daily Telegraph)
Amazon Review
It took five days to settle on BEST BETTE for Bette Midler and WHO ARE YOU KIDMAN? for Nicole Kidman. It seems the worse the cover line, the longer it takes to concoct: HANKS FOR EVERYTHING for Tom Hanks, ELLE ON WHEELS for Elle MacPherson, STONE ALONE for Sharon Stone had taken about a week each... It is a trashy celebrity monthly crammed with high-cheekboned movie stars and exposes of the rich. Manufactured in a New York skyscraper aka slab, "a black monolith sixty stories high", it complements the publishers other titles Her, Men, Ego, Him, Boy, Now and Here. The protagonist Zachary Post is one of It's "slab rats", chasing celebrity interviews and reviewing books he has never read. Self-pitying and lazy, he lives in a state of paranoia, in fear of his faked CV being discovered, and becomes embroiled in complicated office romances. Slab Rat depicts claustrophobic office life in painful detail, from awkward lift conversations to wars over who gets who coffee. Zachary smirks gleefully when the smarmy upper-class English "new boy" Mark Larkin sends faxes the wrong way round. Vitriolic internal emails fly back and forth between ecru cubicles. Self-interest rules and colleagues go to any lengths to move up the ladder. Zachary's jealousy and bitterness take over when the "new boy" is promoted before him. Fear of failure "lingers long into the night". He sets out to get revenge. Based on Ted Heller's experiences working for Vanity Fair and other top US magazines, Slab Rat is well observed and very funny, with the only irritation being Heller's stereotyped and inaccurate ridiculing of English people. Alongside Douglas Coupland's Microserfs and Matt Thorne's Eight Minute Idle, it's a classic office novel. The moral being, as the old country song says, "You gotta get tough or die". --Sarah Champion
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