The Cliff Walk:
A Memoir of a Lost Job and a Found Life
By Don J. Snyder
Little, Brown, 265 pages, $23.95
Executive Blues:
Down and Out in Corporate America
By G.J. Meyer
Dell, 245 pages, $12.95 paper
The Dinosaur Club
By William Heffernan
Morrow, 303 pages, $24
The Dilbert Principle:
A Cubicle’s-Eye View of Bosses, Meetings, Management Fads and Other Workplace Afflictions
By Scott Adams
HarperBusiness, 336 pages, $11.95 paper
America: Who Stole the Dream?
By Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele
Andrews and McMeel, 241 pages, $9.95 paper
As countless thousands of once-loyal employees find themselves unexpectedly looking for jobs after being “downsized” — the ugly verb of the 1990s — there is no joy to be found. Except, surprisingly, in the realm of literature.
If Don J. Snyder had never been downsized from his English professorship at Colgate University, he would never have crafted his achingly lyrical memoir.
If G.J. Meyer had never been downsized at two gigantic corporations (McDonnell Douglas and J.I. Case), his insightful memoir would never have been written, either.
Downsizing has also brought the reading public a stunning investigative book by Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele, who pieced together the expose first for the Philadelphia Inquirer; a serio-comic modern classic from cartoonist Scott Adams; and a made-for-Hollywood novel from prolific fiction writer William Heffernan.
Those five books are only a small percentage of all that could be included in this review. My search located at least 100 books in print that either include “downsizing” in the title or cover the phenomenon for a significant number of pages. Although all five covered in this essay are worthy, “The Cliff Walk” is the book of choice if the criterion is literary merit. Snyder had already published two novels and a biography when he lost his teaching job in March 1992. He was 41, married to the sweet and unselfish Colleen. They were parents to three children younger than 7, with a fourth child due in June.
It will be no surprise to readers that Snyder experienced surprise, then shock, then depression. It probably will be a surprise–especially to readers who have not been downsized–how profound the depression became. Rarely have I worried as a reviewer about giving away the plot of a memoir. But what happened to Snyder is for a while so depressing in its particulars, and–finally, two years later–so redeeming that it would be a shame to spoil the anticipation.
Candid memoirs are trendy in book publishing right now, but a few (“The Liars’ Club,” “Angela’s Ashes” and “The Cliff Walk,” for example) deserve to be read decades from now. While the most readers should reasonably expect from most memoirs is an interesting story clearly told, a few rise to the level of “memorable” because of the writer’s style. I marked paragraphs to read aloud, to share with others, on almost every page in “The Cliff Walk.”
Snyder is that great a stylist. Here is an example, a sentence so long and complicated that few experienced writers would take the risk that it could be understood, much less rise to lyricism. It describes a time about 18 months after Snyder heard he was expendable. Dozens of colleges had rejected his applications, he had done almost nothing to earn money because of his depression, his wife and children were going without new material goods or expensive groceries:
“I know that it takes a very weak man to lose his way when he has a beautiful wife and four healthy children living under his roof, no debt, over three thousand dollars left in the bank, and he’s not in a war or facing anything even close to real peril, but I was so lost over the whole next year of my life that I could never look at Colleen without setting off this amazing image in my head that had her living with another man and working at the drive-through window of a bank in town where I would be the first customer every weekday morning, waiting there, just staring at the glass when she raised the curtain to open for business.”
Snyder’s memoir is pretty much confined to his own actions, emotions and family. Meyer’s memoir, while rarely losing sight of himself for more than a page, nonetheless provides a more contextual look at downsizing. Meyer, a former newspaper reporter who later accepted high-paying public-relations jobs, mentions dozens of other formerly wealthy corporate executives who found themselves suddenly jobless as they passed age 45 or 50.
In chapter after chapter, Meyer skewers recruiters hired by corporations to scour the country for high-ranking executives. Almost every one of those recruiters breaks a promise to call back, sending the recently unemployed victim from hopefulness to despair. Still-employed corporate chieftains are almost without exception portrayed just as negatively; the thought that “there but for the grace of God go I” had either never entered their minds, or else had entered their minds so pervasively that it drove them to inhumanity.
Meyer describes downsized corporation after downsized corporation that sound just like the corporations exposed as unethical and sometimes law-breaking by Barlett and Steele. “America: Who Stole the Dream?” is the third book in Barlett and Steele’s investigative trilogy. It, like the first two–“America: What Went Wrong” and “America: Who Really Pays the Taxes?” — focuses on the brand of downsizing that occurs when employers eliminate U.S. jobs for cheaper labor elsewhere.
Barlett and Steele traveled the nation, then the world, in search of formerly dedicated workers living in fear and poverty because employers refused to reciprocate their loyalty, because politicians skewed public policy in favor of monied special interests, because government regulators wrote the rule book to fix the economic game so the corporate chieftains would accumulate unimaginable wealth.
Unlike Snyder, whose prose is frequently memorable, and Meyer, whose prose is occasionally memorable (even occasionally memorable is a high compliment among writers), Barlett and Steele rarely compose sentences that sing. But their information-gathering sings loud and clear. The bad guys are winning, the song says.
Probably few readers have managed to escape exposure to Dilbert, the creation of Scott Adams. His cartoon strips transmit dark humor from the Byzantine world of business. The many collections of those cartoon strips–some with narrative text added, such as “The Dilbert Principle”–contain substantial sections on downsizing. Here is one paragraph from such a section:
“The secret to making downsizing work is for managers to recognize the psychological impact. Experiments on laboratory animals show that if you apply continuous electrical shocks to a captive dog, eventually your utility bill will be so high that you’ll feel angry at the dog. Companies apply this same medical theory to downsizing. The first rounds of downsizing usually get the people that nobody likes anyway. . . . By the later rounds, managers begin to genuinely hate the remaining employees. They’ll become cold-hearted enough to fire family members while humming show tunes. That’s when the real savings start.”
“Dilbert” is fact in a fictional guise. “The Dinosaur Club,” the sole novel in this review, is clearly fiction because it’s the only book in which the good guys–those who have been heartlessly downsized–win. Enough said.
