read: company
As long as it sticks to situation comedy, Max Barry's Coupland-lite corporate satire succeeds as a reasonably unchallenging in-flight diversion. Unfortunately, laughable-in-the-wrong-way sex scenes, lazy character arcs and preachy apparatchik posturing eventually sink what might have been a breezy, disposable trade paperback. Most embarrassingly, Barry's tendency to overuse stock descriptive phrases, carried over from his earlier works, is distracting and suggestive of slack editorial oversight.