Although I just started it, I don't like the style and I don't find any valuable content...I'll keep reading it but just "randomly", as I don't think it's worth the time. ( )

Uncomfortable reading in these economic times, this novel--by turns a comic and a tragic representation of life at a rapidly dissolving advertising agency--paints a familiar picture of life in all kinds of offices. I liked it for the humanness of its portrayal of people often seen as cogs in the corporate machine. ( )

Added because of this excerpt posted at the GB Book Club blog."We didn't know who was responsible for putting the sushi roll behind Joe Pope's bookshelf. The first couple of days Joe had no clue about the sushi. Then he started taking furtive sniffs at his pits, and holding the wall of his palm to his mouth to get blowback from his breath. By the end of the week, he was certain it wasn't him.We smelled it, too. Persistent, high in the nostrils, it became worse than a dying animal. Joe's gorge rose every time he entered his office. The following week the smell was so atrocious the building people got involved, hunting the office for what turned out to be a sunshine roll- tuna, whitefish, salmon, and sprouts. Mike Boroshansky, the chief of security, kept bringing his tie up to his nose, as if he were a real cop at the scene of a murder." ( )

I loved the style of this book, and the rambling, unstructured feel to all of the dialogue, but it left me a little flat. Usually I like snapshot settings, where there’s no back story and you’re just dumped into a narrative (a la Catcher In The Rye), but this book was a bit lacking in anything at all. It was funny, don’t get me wrong, but not as good as I thought it would be. ( )

I've never watched either version of The Office. I have worked a generic cubicle job during a downsizing. I bought this before most of the reviews came out. Put all that together, and I was very satisfied with the book.

I found the characters and their antics perfectly credible. They were a bit more extreme than in my own workplace, but still in the same family, and you (I) want a novel to be an enhanced (over-saturated?) version of real life anyway.

The first person plural worked well; it was like someone coming home and telling you about their day. Of course, it's when most people don't have anyone at home that their work and personal lives can mesh so unhealthily. Again, familiar and realistic.

I certainly wouldn't want to work with those people. I wouldn't want to work in the corporate environment again in general. And maybe that helped me enjoy it -- knowing I'd recently escaped that world. ( )