Office Politics

Ever since college, George Wren has dreamed of working at The Outsider, the prestigious weekly edited by his hero, the suave English expat Gilbert Twining. So when George sees a listing for a junior editor, he trades in his job at CBS for half the salary—and a ringside seat in the unexpectedly cutthroat arena of a small-circulation, highbrow little magazine. To George’s surprise and dismay, The Outsider is seething with malcontents and mutineers, at least according to Twining, who keeps cornering George for after-work martinis, pouring out his anxieties, professional and otherwise, while George’s wife, Matilda, and baby son wait for him back in Queens. Is Twining paranoid? Is he insane? Or are George’s new office-mates truly plotting an insurrection? And if so, what’s all of it got to do with George? 

An indelible satire of 1960s intellectual New York, Office Politics is also a celebration of that endangered species, the office, at its pettiest and most idealistic, as the proving ground where so much of grownup life takes place.

“A classic workplace satire, back in print: Wilfrid Sheed’s novel Office Politics depicts the comic dramas of life at a literary magazine with sincere and humane charm . . . Sheed proportions his characters to sympathetic dimensions and makes them care about the work they do, resulting in a sincere and delightful novel . . . The novel can be awfully funny [and] remarkably uncynical for a satire . . . The graceful balancing act Sheed achieves is to prove the magazine’s inherent worth — and to convince us that no publication is worth it all.”

—Walker Rutter-Bowman, The Washington Post

“A masterpiece . . . One of the few genuinely comic novels since Lucky Jim.”

—Elaine Dundy

“Mr. Sheed is a master . . . Classical in structure and style, this, his best work, realizes its comic intention with grace and clarity . . . This is a fine work indeed, by a virtuoso of the comic who never hits below the belt and never misses his mark.”

—Albert Duhamel, The New York Times

“If Joseph Heller, Henry James, Evelyn Waugh and Kingsley Amis collaborated on a scathing novel of cubicle mutiny, it might resemble Wilfrid Sheed’s delightful Office Politics.”

—Robert Allen Papinchak, The Times Literary Supplement

“Office Politics [is] the best of Sheed’s novels and one that remains uncommonly fresh after all these years . . .  Sheed is one of the lamentably few American writers who understand that the office is at least as much home for many of us as home itself . . . [A] very funny, very wise, unjustly neglected book.”

—Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post

“A comic masterpiece . . . If you yearn for the mythical days when magazine staffers had their own offices, went to long lunches, and whose work mattered more in their minds than anywhere else, then rush out . . . and buy Office Politics.”

—Jim Kelly, Air Mail

“Office Politics is about work, but it is also about something deeper than that: The decline of meaningful work. It is about how we can grow up and find a measure of happiness by becoming reconciled to our own ordinariness . . . [Sheed] never forgets his duty to entertain and care for the reader’s patience. Office Politics . . . deftly paints a small canvas, does its business efficiently, and is full of sharp, quotable phrases. Couldn’t that stand as the definition of a minor masterpiece?”

—John Broening, Electric Literature

“Office Politics is about the ironies of jockeying for influence at an uninfluential periodical . . . The jokes in Office Politics are still funny, and its weariness still resounds, one subordinate’s sigh at a time, within the 501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations that today produce our most important, least-read magazines. Sheed’s novel has warmth, too, and plenty of wisdom about finding meaning in life and how to face middle age among moribund institutions . . . This is the book I’ll remember as I’m led to the firing squad.”

—Dan Piepenbring, Harper’s Magazine

“Part Chesterton and part Evelyn Waugh and part Cyril Connelly. He nods at Mr. Cheever, Elizabeth Hardwick and Jean Stafford. He is clean, but sly.”

—John Leonard

“Mr. Sheed is a writer of deft but deceptively offhand wit. He sees through things to the sources of the aching pains and fleeting satisfactions of modern American middle-class existence . . . As a guide to how the game is played . . . Office Politics is an expert work, and a gasser, too . . . Mr. Sheed has much to say about how we treat and mistreat each other in the daily round—that is in the essentials—of ordinary and supposedly civilized life.”

—Eliot Fremont-Smith, The New York Times

Wilfrid Sheed (1930–2011) was born in London, the son of the prominent Catholic publishers Sheed & Ward. Raised between London and Philadelphia, educated at Oxford, Sheed eventually moved to New York, where he became an editor and critic at the magazines Jubilee and Commonweal and later a columnist at the New York Times Book Review. A survivor of polio who wrote memoirs of his illness, and of his addictions to drugs and alcohol, he also published nine novels, several essay collections, and books on baseball and jazz.

Gerald Howard is a retired book editor whose essays and reviews have appeared in a variety of publications.  He is currently working on a biographical study of the editor and critic Malcolm Cowley.

Office Politics • Paperback ISBN: 9781961341180

Pub: Sep 10, 2024 • McNALLY EDITIONS no. 32

5" x 8.5" • 320 pages • $18.00

eBook ISBN: 9781946022721