Reviews

Company

I just finished Company, a novel by Max Barry, and I'm still trying to figure out what I think about it. It's not that I didn't enjoy the experience. It's a briskly-told story about a young college graduate named Jones who's just been hired by Zephyr Holdings, which is an obvious stand-in for everything that is wrong in corporate America. I've never worked for a large company, but my wife does, and Barry nails many of the absurdities — the constant reorganizations, the cut-throat politics, and the brutal/comical ways in which employees are treated. At this humorous surface level, Company is a success.

On other levels, though, I'm left with more questions than answers. The story's primary conflict is between Eve, a completely amoral business consultant whose only interest is in maximizing efficiency regardless of the human toll, and Jones, who feels that somehow the employees "deserve better." Via Eve, we are given the standard arguments why corporations should not care about their workers as people, but rather manage them as resources. Bottom line: if companies aren't as efficient as possible (read: wring every last possible erg of work from their employees), they fail, and then everyone is out of a job. Corporate America is the worst of all possible systems, then, except for all the others. So get over it.

Of course, Zephyr itself is meant to serve as the counter-argument. In its endless quest to cut costs and increase productivity, it's become a completely dysfunctional. And I'm with Barry as far as that goes. But I'm still left wondering where he thinks the middle ground is. Is there a conflict between employee satisfaction and productivity? Is there a point where employees just have to suck it in order for the company to be successful? We never really get any good answers.

Complicating matters is the very odd relationship between Jones and Eve. The chemistry behind their "merger" is never made entirely clear, and both characters come off as machines at times, able to turn their emotions on and off at will. Which is fine for Eve, whose not supposed to be fully human, but in Jones' case it just doesn't quite fit.

I'll think about these questions some more in the coming days, and that in itself is the best reason to read any book.

WhiteHouse.gov Redesign

WhiteHouse.gov just got a facelift, so let's take a quick look at the new homepage.

Design: I'm not a fan. It's too boxy, too monochromatic, and uses whitespace really poorly. For the most part, the text is too small, except for the second box in the center column where it is inexplicably larger. Overall, the design comes across as cramped and amateurish.

Features: According to White House website boss David Almacy, there's nothing new to see here. The changes that were made were intended, among other things, to highlight the AV and RSS features. These sections, however, don't seem to have made it into the main navigation yet. Video and photos aren't linked from most of the interior pages; podcasts and RSS are linked from every page, but only in a jumble of extra stuff next to the search box. There is a nice integration of audio and video with the text-based stories in some of the section archives, but too often, a video or audio link lands you on a blank page with an embedded player — not the nicest presentation. And the RSS feeds are oddly organized.

Standards: Viewing the HTML source, it's like a trip back to 1999 — tables, tables, everywhere. The HTML doesn't validate, either — a whopping 127 errors! Lots of careless closing tag problems, but lots of other errors that are reflective of amateur hour: two title tags in the head; ids being reused, etc. I don't think the developers bothered to validate the HTML, but given their apparent skill level, they really should have.

The markup is littered with inline styles combined with 22 1/2 sets of font tags (yup, an end tag is missing). There is also an external style sheet with doesn't validate (although the error is a simple typo). The style declarations themselves don't seem to have a standard unit of measure — px mixed with em mixed with font-size keywords — which make them very confusing.

Conclusion: The whitehouse.gov team really should have taken some extra time to get more of this stuff right. There is certainly potential here. There are some nice design elements on some of the interior pages, and this site has multimedia content too burn. But it's handicapped by spaghetti code and the lack of a unifying aesthetic vision. These are common problems with large sites, to be sure — but they are solvable with effort. So I wonder — why aren't they being solved here?

Luce

Last Saturday night, Mary and I had dinner at Luce. We've been to its more casual sister restaurant, Coco Osteria, several times, but we were hesitant to try Luce because of its reputation of being overpriced. But after watching Rudy Maxa traipse around the Amalfi Coast, we decided to give Luce a try.

We arrived about 15 minutes before our 8pm reservation, hoping to get a glass of prosecco at the bar before dinner. When we called for the reservation, we also heard someone in the background saying how they were fully-booked and anyone who was late would just have to wait. But early wasn't a guarantee of not waiting, as it turned out; we weren't seated until around 8:20. True, it's a small restaurant, but the wait was rather frustrating. The prosecco, however, was tasty.

The menu is set up American style — no primi or secondi here, just appetizers, salads, and entrees. We were pleased to find that the food was reasonably priced — most entrees were in the $18-25 range, and the salads and appetizers were generally under $10.

Mary and I both had a Caesar salad. It was fine, but there wasn't anything special or memorable about it. For the main course, I had the garganelli — beef tips and penne pasta in a rich gravy. It tasted wonderful, and while the pasta was probably a minute past al dente, that didn't detract that much from the dish. Mary had the veal picatta, which was also quite good.

They have a nice wine list with a strong emphasis on Italian reds. We had a nice Brunello, although not the one I intended to order when I arrived. I spent about 15 minutes going over the wine list online, and had settled on a nice 1999 Il Poggione, but the website's list is horribly out of date and that bottle wasn't available.

The service was spotty, from start to finish. We had to wait for everything — the table, the food, and the check. It was a busy night, but the delays were a bit much. But Mary and I are going to give Luce a second chance — the food is worth at least that.

The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil

Last night, during a bout of insomnia, I read The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, by George Saunders. It wasn't hard to read it all in one sitting. For one thing, the book is a short 130 pages, laid out like a high-school term paper — big font, generous margins, and some extra line-spacing. Cover to cover, it took me about 90 minutes, and I'm not a very fast reader.

But it wasn't hard in another, more important way — it was excellent, biting satire, and very hard to put down. I'm not going to bother with the plot summary or excerpts; I'm sure you can find those at your favorite online bookseller when you put this in your shopping cart or on your wish-list. But just know that, if you have anything like my political sensibilities, you'll be amazed at how the title character Phil — who literally steals his presidency and exudes the arrogance and pitiful meanness of the powerful-and-stupid — captures similar characteristics (and many more) of another President we might know, and does so with such vivid images paired with a remarkable economy of words.

But don't get lazy, as I found myself doing about half-way through the book. What I liked best about Phil was that as soon as you unpacked one level of satire, you found yourself in the middle of another. Almost every character has an important line or two, and you'll miss a good deal of the fun if you don't pause to figure out what they are all really saying.

The book's briefness probably works to its credit, since it is forced to be so sharp with few wasted moves (only the section where Phil meets his "special friends" seemed to drag a little). In a similar way, the fantastical setting and circumstances means that much of the background and detail doesn't need an in-depth explanation. When I finished the book, I did want a few more pages, but at the distance of only a few hours, I'm happy it stopped right where it did. I'll enjoy mulling over the meaning of the last two pages for a while, I'm sure.