New Novels Reflect New Understanding

BUSINESSMEN IN FICTION

THAT'S no ulcer . . . That's rot-0the rot that works in the belly of all you big shots." Thus, the hero of the latest novel about U.S. business, Company Man by John G. Burnett (Harper; $3.50), castigates his spineless section chief for caving in to the pressure of office politics. On the surface, Author Burnett's tale, revolving about a big U.S. airline, is merely one more in the long list of novels, from Frank Norris' The Octopus to Sinclair Lewis' Babbitt and John Dos Passos' The Big Money, that show businessmen at their materialistic worst. Yet for all the angry talk of flint-hearted, fatheaded bosses, there is a big difference in Company Man that is symptomatic of the spate of new novels rediscovering the American business scene. A businessman himself (onetime ad manager for Braniff Airlines), Author Burnett has tried to analyze and report how a big U.S. business works in modern-day society.

There are still some critics who argue that today's authors are no more sympathetic to business than their counterparts of the '30s and earlier. Says White House Economic Adviser Gabriel Hauge: "It's high time to portray the constructive things businessmen do. The motivation is more than money, it's the excitement of creation."

But the weight of evidence is that U.S. authors have indeed changed their approach to the businessman, and that their novels reflect the changing times. Author-Critic John Chamberlain, who eight years ago wrote in FORTUNE that novelists "are not only antibusiness; they are also anti-fecundity and anti-life," now feels that "the businessman has been made much more human."

Adds Harvard Assistant Professor Kenneth S. Lynn, writing in the Harvard Business Review: "The lament that businessmen are treated with universal hostility has become less valid with the passage of time."

Though the current crop of novels and plays may not be right on target, Lynn argues that authors approach their task with an inquiring and often sympathetic mind. Even the barbed humor in such plays as The Solid Gold Cadillac is aimed at the funny bone rather than the jugular. As General Bullmoose, a tycoon's tycoon, says wistfully in the new musical comedy Li'l Abner: "Ever since I was a child, I had a dream. And all that simple child wanted was to get his hands on all the money in the world before the Greatest Broker of them all called him to that big Stock Market in the Sky.''