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Executive Times |
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2008 Book Reviews |
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New
Bedlam by Bill Flanagan |
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Rating: |
** |
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(Mildly Recommended) |
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Click
on title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Disorder Bill
Flanagan uses a family owned cable television network, King Cable, as the
backdrop for his novel, New
Bedlam. The novel has ample chuckles as Flanagan proceeds at a slow and
steady pace with his plot. The King family has issues. One channel handles
boomer reruns, another is an arts channel and the third is a comic book
channel. Each is run by a child of the company founder, who used to sell
cars. Protagonist Bobby Kahn was a network television executive until he was
fired, and the King family brings him in to deal with their issues. By the
end of the novel, I didn’t care a lot about what happened to any of the
characters. Here’s an excerpt, from the beginning of Chapter 3, pp. 22-3: Bobby
collapsed into his airplane seat exhausted. He had fought with his taxi
driver over the best route to take to beat the rush-hour traffic to JFK and
was sure that the cabbie had driven into the worst bumper-to-bumper
construction mess in the five boroughs out of spite. Check-in
did nothing to sooth his anxiety. The airline was practicing tough love with
its corporate passengers and the woman behind the counter refused to upgrade
Bobby to first class on air miles alone. The full cost of a first-class
ticket was two thousand, two hundred and eight dollars, and did he wish to
purchase one? Bobby pointed out that he was already holding an
eighteen-hundred-dollar business-class ticket and as he had many thousands of
frequent-flier miles, a platinum card, and flew this airline at least twice a
month, she should just give him a seat up front if one was sitting empty. He
knew the airlines were having tough times and trying to force business
travelers to spend full fare; the unspoken subtext was, hey, it's not YOUR
money. In this case, though, it was. Bobby had paid for his own ticket to Los
Angeles, the first time he could remember doing that since college, and he
was determined to use his miles to get the rest of the way up the plane. It
was not a matter of luxury. He was flying to California under the pretext of
network business to try to drop in on as many potential new employers as
possible. He had lined up lunch with a sitcom producer, dinner with a big
syndicator, and a tentative golf game with a former subordinate now doing
well at a rival network. Bobby was going to have to shovel a lot of schmooze
in the next few days, and he could blow the whole thing if anyone from the
industry saw him sitting anywhere but first class. "You
know," he said to the clerk with what sweetness he could summon,
"my company spends about a hundred thousand dollars on this airline
every week. I've always found you folks pretty reasonable about bumping me up
if there's an empty seat in first." "It's
not first, sir, it's premium." "Premium." She
clicked through her computer screen. She seemed to be taking longer than
necessary. Finally she said, "We do have one seat open in premium. How
would you like to pay for it?" Bobby
pointed again to his Platinum Miles card on the counter. The woman said,
"It will cost you ten thousand air miles plus a same-day access fee of
seventy-five dollars." "Fine,"
said Bobby. She took a phone call. Bobby boiled. Eventually she printed out
a green and white computer card, drew lines through it, scribbled all over
its face, and told him he better hurry, the flight was about to board and it
was at the very last gate at the farthest archipelago of the terminal. He thanked her for taking such good care of
him and smiled. There
are enough funny passages in New
Bedlam to keep turning the pages. Like many cable shows, it’s easier
sometimes to keep watching to see what happens rather than turn it off or
switch channels. Steve
Hopkins, January 22, 2008 |
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Go to Executive Times Archives |
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The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the February 2008 issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/New Bedlam.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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