FALLING SIDEWAYS
By Thomas E. Kennedy
(Bloomsbury) - "Falling Sideways," by Thomas E. Kennedy; Bloomsbury 290 pp. $26
Bloomsbury
290 pp. $26
by Jonathan Yardley
A year ago Thomas E. Kennedy emerged from undeserved obscurity with the English-language publication of “In the Company of Angels,” the first novel in what he calls his “Copenhagen Quartet.” An American now in his mid-60s and a longtime resident of Copenhagen, he has been widely published in Europe and has been awarded a number of prestigious literary prizes, yet until last year he had gone almost entirely unpublished in his native country. The favorable reception accorded “In the Company of Angels” seems to have put him on track at last, a process that may continue with the publication here of the somewhat less successful “Falling Sideways,” the second of his four Copenhagen novels.
Apart from being set in that Danish city, the two novels could hardly be more dissimilar. “In the Company of Angels” is at heart a love story, the principals being a Chilean who has come to a Danish center for the rehabilitation of torture victims and the local woman who becomes deeply involved in his case. By contrast “Falling Sideways” is that rarest of commodities in American literary fiction, a novel about men and women at work; it is part-satire and part-drama, and it is very smart.
The workplace is called the Tank. Kennedy never makes explicitly clear what it does — I have no idea why — but it appears to be a blend of think tank, foundation and university, though its main function seems to be to spin wheels. The son of one of its ranking employees, Frederick Breathwaite, a young man named Jes, had a student job there for a while:
“Jes had been amazed at how little anyone seemed to do. They wrote e-mails or sometimes letters, photocopied and filed them, sent them, and received responses, which needed new letters, new photocopies, new files. They went to meetings. Sometimes some of the big shots went to meetings in other cities or other countries where they apparently had their e-mails translated into other languages so they could talk about them with foreigners. Meanwhile, there were a million truly important things that needed doing in the world, things that were a matter of life and death for people who lived in poverty and misery. Jes wanted a foot into that door.”
Now, though, the door through which Jes’s father passes every day is not so wide as it used to be. At the regular meeting of what’s known to insiders as “the Mumble Club” — “Six chiefs and the CEO, Martin Kampman, who chaired. Four men, two women” — Kampman gives them the bad news: “It hasn’t hit us yet, but there will be a substantial deficit in the last quarter of this year. It might be as high as one hundred and fifty million. So I have to ask every one of you to draft a plan for cutting costs, to absorb the loss.” When the others express astonishment and bewilderment, the CEO says, “You all know — or should know — what has been happening these past many months with foreign investments as well as that both the state and the county have decided to cut our subsidies.” When Breathwaite objects — “We discussed that nearly two years ago. And again last year. It was not seen as a threat” — Kampman icily replies, “The possibility was clear.”
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