cover image The Cost of Living

The Cost of Living

David Dorsey. Viking Books, $23.95 (304pp) ISBN 978-0-670-87471-2

This comic first novel by the author The Force, a nonfiction account of the Xerox sales team, puts an adman through some Bonfire of the Vanities-like paces but falls short of its satirical mark. Narrator Richard Cahill works a gazillion hours at his Rochester, N.Y., advertising firm. Putting in still more hours at his home office nights and weekends, he's losing touch with his teenage daughter and his art-dealer wife. When he does find a spare minute to treat his son to a quick burger at McDonald's, he walks into the middle of a hold-up. And that's when his life gets really complicated. The twist: when hard work isn't enough to secure his financial future, Cahill turns to crime, manipulated and threatened by a savvy drug dealer. What begins as a clever parable--filled with scheming co-workers and cheating spouses--about today's kill-or-be-killed business environment degrades into a catalogue of brand names thinly wrapped in a story (barely a page goes by, it seems, that doesn't mention Seinfeld, Spike Lee or MTV). Outside the mass media that are his bread and butter, Cahill proves an unobservant narrator, content to define characters--himself included--by the brands they wear and cliches of their personal history: ""I could pass for just another J. Crew suburban dad, as if I hadn't grown up in a broken home...."" Meanwhile, Cahill's involvment in a drug deal never beccomes convincing. On the miseries of mid-level life, Dorsey can be very funny, and his book would have been better, perhaps, had he let it run more confidently into the absurd. He does hit enough targets, hoever, to catch the attention of both real-life media mavens and less harried readers. (Aug.)