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The Middlemen: A Satire
"A sprawling ant-heap of middlemen" is how Rusty Conway, Chief Public Relations Officer of U.V.I., describes the world; and here, in the pages of The Middlemen, they all are; Rusty and his boys in Statistics and Consumer Research, Serena, Rusty's psycho-analyst, and her husband, the high-brow critic; Harry Thorpe the pushing Sales Promotion manager with the carefully preserved Yorkshire accent; Hughie Hill, purveyor of Facts on TV, a publisher, a literary agent, an M.P., a journalist; a gaggle of estate agents. At parties, in their offices, in their homes, they are all so busy "relating" to each other that they lose sight of their own identities.
In their midst, at unpredictable intervals, bursts Serena's remarkable twin sister Stella; and perhaps of all of them she alone does not qualify as a middlewoman. She is maddening, quarrelsome, flamboyant and absurd. She takes obscure jobs in obscure parts of the world and in retrospect invests them with a bogus glamour. She quarrels with everyone and makes nothing of her life. But she is alive, and of all of them is the only one who at the end remains so.
In their midst, at unpredictable intervals, bursts Serena's remarkable twin sister Stella; and perhaps of all of them she alone does not qualify as a middlewoman. She is maddening, quarrelsome, flamboyant and absurd. She takes obscure jobs in obscure parts of the world and in retrospect invests them with a bogus glamour. She quarrels with everyone and makes nothing of her life. But she is alive, and of all of them is the only one who at the end remains so.
213 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1961
30 people want to read
About the author
Christine Brooke-Rose
42 books101 followersChristine Frances Evelyn Brooke-Rose was a British writer and literary critic, known principally for her later, experimental novels. Born in Geneva and educated at Somerville College, Oxford and University College, London, she taught at the University of Paris, Vincennes, from 1968 to 1988 and lived for many years in the south of France.
She was married three times: to Rodney Bax, whom she met at Bletchley Park; to the poet Jerzy Pietrkiewicz; and briefly to Claude Brooke. She shared the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction for Such (1966).
She was also known as a translator from French, in particular of works by Robbe-Grillet.
NYT obituary.
She was married three times: to Rodney Bax, whom she met at Bletchley Park; to the poet Jerzy Pietrkiewicz; and briefly to Claude Brooke. She shared the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction for Such (1966).
She was also known as a translator from French, in particular of works by Robbe-Grillet.
NYT obituary.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
January 19, 2015
Before reading this book all I knew about Christine Brooke-Rose was a slim Structuralist Ezra Pound canto-analysis that is barely readable even with appropriate training, and the groovy cultish awe among fans of her avante-gard experimentalism. While I realized that this novel was written before her more challenging stuff and that the subtitle "A Satire" doesn't usually signal much convention-smashing, the last thing I expected was a gossipy Mary McCarthy-style flaying of characters and acidic snark-fest feast upon the vapidity of communication among people busy "networking." With the exception of an occasional neologism like "teledecollatage," this book foreshadows few of CBR's future pursuits.
But it is much juicy fun. It also reminds me of an early novel by Philip K. Dick--stay with me here--the woefully overlooked The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike, a title which might make one think that it's one of his stranger tales of slippery identity or sci-fi paranoia, but is actually a rather staid spoof on mid-century conformity, chauvinism, and class-consciousness.
Middlemen is better than both of these: first, CBR has no trouble setting a scene without bogging down in what I call McCarthy's "listy-ness," long catalogs of specific items clueing us to taste, class, and such; second, sentence-by-sentence she's far more talented than Dick whose strong suit has always been concept over execution.
CBR has an electron-microscope eye for pretentions of sophistication, especially as they are affected with the props of high tech knowingness. While her observations about the true thinness of the newer and better ways we are able to "relate" to one another ring true, they also inadvertantly show up how such current concerns are anything but new: this was published in 1961.
Her merciless dissection of the way people fetishized advances in media and science reads much like the things you hear today decrying video games, Twitter, smartphones, etc as if we are in a proto-apocalyptically unique phase of human "progress." What gives her observations a depth beyond that of, say, Gary Shteyngart's, is that she isn't focusing on the stuff as the source of the phoniness; she locates it precisely at what has always been its source: PEOPLE, and the ways they differentiate themselves from others, groups from other groups, and the tech is just a tool at worse, an accessory at best.
The title The Middlemen refers to the bloating of the corporate model of business until a whole social class is created which produces nothing, improves nothing, and slaves to find new more effective ways of signifying nothing:
"We are all middlemen, selling to others something we do not own, something we have not made, something we do not intimately understand, and the profit, though larger of course than that of those who make, is less than it used to be when there were fewer middlemen, except for the bigger middlemen, who then need more middlmen to interpret their middlemanship to other middlemen lower down."
These are almost the thoughts of one such middleman, Rusty Conway, a public relations executive whose existence, like the rest of the characters, is presented by a voice that knows just a little more than he does but is still wed to his POV when it's his turn to endure CBR's withering narration. We meet him wallowing in self pity before his psycho-analyst, Serena. He is aggrieved at having to deal with so many uncooperative colleagues in his efforts to reduce the damage felt by his company from the unfortunate fact that some fabrics it has produced turned out to be fatally flammable for a few unfortunate females.
Serena's gentle attempt to make him face the human-suffering portion of that problem spurs a casual yet startling sexually hostile "joke"--directed at her--which she absorbs with an equanimity that he unthinkingly mistakes for the deference he is due. And he is one of the less unpleasant characters (!), something we quickly learn at a hilarious business-lunch scene where ass-kissing and snotty one-upsmanship are woven into a skein of phoniness that coats the characters like an unctious film yet still somehow lubricates the lunchers' conniving and cajoling toward their own objectives.
No one would call it a subtle, humane, or generous rendering, but CBR's deftness, wit, style, and economy make her disgust so positively contagious that you hardly realize you've already met almost all the characters, learned their motivations, and know enough about them to sense a half-dozen sites for potential conflict. CBR is so expert at insinuating expository information into scene-setting, dialog, characters' thoughts and actions that it never grates as it can with the spoon-feeding techniques of less capable satirists.
When she does deign to more direct exposition, her verbal flair soothes any irritation:
"Such a little thing to ask. So natural, between sisters, between twins. What had gone wrong, that it should have grown so big, as little things do between two human beings who love one another completely with hate and envy and thick curtains of indifference?"
These fraternal twin sisters are Serena the psycho-analyst and Stella, a gadabout globe-trotting secretary who bounces from one international gig to the next, returning to London faithfully every summer with a story of professional or romantic tragedy and that special condescension of the obnoxious traveller: "Oh, but you're wrong about Argentina, I assure you. I've lived there for years."
Serena: "Even London is a village, professionally speaking. Or rather, the professions are a cluster of villages, each cut off from the other yet somehow linked by the odd vagabond who peddles his gossip from one to another." Unintentinally (?), she's describing her sister Stella.
Serena and Stella prove to be a handy axis of narrative information, one being a shrink people spill their guts to, the other being a social butterfly. This axis supplies the grid, or playing field, for the jockeying of journalists, real estate and literary agents, media personalities, cultural critics, politicians, corporate middlemen, and, of course, lawyers. They all influence, manipulate, and outright use one another to get what they want, cheerily camoflaged by British manners and an empty genre of interpersonal communication which CBR portrays with undisguised disgust, with semi-disguised glee.
It's a sharp bite on the romp; no one gets away without sporting CBR's teethmarks, but for her readers wanting to dig on her psychedelic syntagmatricks and paradigmstore pyrotechnix, this rather conventional novel will be a disappointment.
But it is much juicy fun. It also reminds me of an early novel by Philip K. Dick--stay with me here--the woefully overlooked The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike, a title which might make one think that it's one of his stranger tales of slippery identity or sci-fi paranoia, but is actually a rather staid spoof on mid-century conformity, chauvinism, and class-consciousness.
Middlemen is better than both of these: first, CBR has no trouble setting a scene without bogging down in what I call McCarthy's "listy-ness," long catalogs of specific items clueing us to taste, class, and such; second, sentence-by-sentence she's far more talented than Dick whose strong suit has always been concept over execution.
CBR has an electron-microscope eye for pretentions of sophistication, especially as they are affected with the props of high tech knowingness. While her observations about the true thinness of the newer and better ways we are able to "relate" to one another ring true, they also inadvertantly show up how such current concerns are anything but new: this was published in 1961.
Her merciless dissection of the way people fetishized advances in media and science reads much like the things you hear today decrying video games, Twitter, smartphones, etc as if we are in a proto-apocalyptically unique phase of human "progress." What gives her observations a depth beyond that of, say, Gary Shteyngart's, is that she isn't focusing on the stuff as the source of the phoniness; she locates it precisely at what has always been its source: PEOPLE, and the ways they differentiate themselves from others, groups from other groups, and the tech is just a tool at worse, an accessory at best.
The title The Middlemen refers to the bloating of the corporate model of business until a whole social class is created which produces nothing, improves nothing, and slaves to find new more effective ways of signifying nothing:
"We are all middlemen, selling to others something we do not own, something we have not made, something we do not intimately understand, and the profit, though larger of course than that of those who make, is less than it used to be when there were fewer middlemen, except for the bigger middlemen, who then need more middlmen to interpret their middlemanship to other middlemen lower down."
These are almost the thoughts of one such middleman, Rusty Conway, a public relations executive whose existence, like the rest of the characters, is presented by a voice that knows just a little more than he does but is still wed to his POV when it's his turn to endure CBR's withering narration. We meet him wallowing in self pity before his psycho-analyst, Serena. He is aggrieved at having to deal with so many uncooperative colleagues in his efforts to reduce the damage felt by his company from the unfortunate fact that some fabrics it has produced turned out to be fatally flammable for a few unfortunate females.
Serena's gentle attempt to make him face the human-suffering portion of that problem spurs a casual yet startling sexually hostile "joke"--directed at her--which she absorbs with an equanimity that he unthinkingly mistakes for the deference he is due. And he is one of the less unpleasant characters (!), something we quickly learn at a hilarious business-lunch scene where ass-kissing and snotty one-upsmanship are woven into a skein of phoniness that coats the characters like an unctious film yet still somehow lubricates the lunchers' conniving and cajoling toward their own objectives.
No one would call it a subtle, humane, or generous rendering, but CBR's deftness, wit, style, and economy make her disgust so positively contagious that you hardly realize you've already met almost all the characters, learned their motivations, and know enough about them to sense a half-dozen sites for potential conflict. CBR is so expert at insinuating expository information into scene-setting, dialog, characters' thoughts and actions that it never grates as it can with the spoon-feeding techniques of less capable satirists.
When she does deign to more direct exposition, her verbal flair soothes any irritation:
"Such a little thing to ask. So natural, between sisters, between twins. What had gone wrong, that it should have grown so big, as little things do between two human beings who love one another completely with hate and envy and thick curtains of indifference?"
These fraternal twin sisters are Serena the psycho-analyst and Stella, a gadabout globe-trotting secretary who bounces from one international gig to the next, returning to London faithfully every summer with a story of professional or romantic tragedy and that special condescension of the obnoxious traveller: "Oh, but you're wrong about Argentina, I assure you. I've lived there for years."
Serena: "Even London is a village, professionally speaking. Or rather, the professions are a cluster of villages, each cut off from the other yet somehow linked by the odd vagabond who peddles his gossip from one to another." Unintentinally (?), she's describing her sister Stella.
Serena and Stella prove to be a handy axis of narrative information, one being a shrink people spill their guts to, the other being a social butterfly. This axis supplies the grid, or playing field, for the jockeying of journalists, real estate and literary agents, media personalities, cultural critics, politicians, corporate middlemen, and, of course, lawyers. They all influence, manipulate, and outright use one another to get what they want, cheerily camoflaged by British manners and an empty genre of interpersonal communication which CBR portrays with undisguised disgust, with semi-disguised glee.
It's a sharp bite on the romp; no one gets away without sporting CBR's teethmarks, but for her readers wanting to dig on her psychedelic syntagmatricks and paradigmstore pyrotechnix, this rather conventional novel will be a disappointment.
July 30, 2015
The fourth and most appealing of the early "conventional" (a misnomer, nonetheless it is not the exploratory genre developed later by Brooke-Rose) novels, The Middlemen is humorous, witty, replete with clever commentary disguised as asides demonstrating CB-R's sharp intellectual ability to foretell the shape of things arriving.
Of interest also, according to letters in the Harry Ransome archive of her works and personal effects, is the history surrounding the making of this novel: after a particularly acrimonious period with her sibling, CB-R sought to create a character based on her sister and more sympathetic to a reader than the role she gave herself in the book. Whether she succeeded is best determined by delving between its covers.
Well worth the read.
Of interest also, according to letters in the Harry Ransome archive of her works and personal effects, is the history surrounding the making of this novel: after a particularly acrimonious period with her sibling, CB-R sought to create a character based on her sister and more sympathetic to a reader than the role she gave herself in the book. Whether she succeeded is best determined by delving between its covers.
Well worth the read.
February 16, 2015
CB-R’s last (and best) of her quartet of light Kensington realist novels is a waspish production centring around those Malcolms in the middle who make our lives more intolerable than usual. Beleaguered protagonist Serena Scott-Buttery, desperate to slink up the property ladder, encounters spineless middlemen wherever she turns, from estate agents (the lowest form of human life), to contractors, mortgagors, to TV producers (one rung below estate agents on the scale of primordial slime-dwellers). Having to deal with erratic Euro-hopping sister Stella and her neck-wringing affectations also presses down on poor Serena. The Middlemen is the crankiest of CB-R’s mocking and acidic early novels, perhaps a kiss-off to the England that became too tedious and provincial in its ways (for such a genius), and a forerunner of the tech-satire and cultural critique to follow in masterworks Xorandor and Amalgamemnon. A charming exit from the middlebrow, arrivederci, over and Out soon followed.
July 3, 2015
The last of CBR's conventional novels is a superb social satire of Britain at the beginning of the 60s. A world where the future seems to be cheap foreign holidays and synthetic fibres made by vast benevolent corporations and advertised over commercial TV. Yet already things are going wrong: the products aren't so great, the public not so gullible, and anyway the whole sprawling mess is still dominated by the old elite who've simply found ways to insinuate themselves in to every available crevice. The "middlemen" are in the ascendent, mostly the old guard adapting to reduced circumstances and buckling under to the new democratic spirit set in motion after 1945. They all know each other, of course, through extended networks and dinner parties and cocktail evenings and big society events. At the same time they are terribly anxious about how long it will all last, not just from the threat of global war but also from the inexorable shrinkage of the world they were raised to expect and feel entitled to, as Britain is in its post-Suez decline and nobody cares about refined ideals of culture anymore - or rather, don't bother pretending to care anymore.
This is the same fictiverse as "The Sycamore Tree" - The Sunday Supplement and Howard Cutting (whose wife left him, and went off to South America) get passing mentions, but they aren't important. It's a world CBR could have kept going through further instalments and had a decent career out of it. Other people did quite well with less. Instead, it all ends here and the author comes back in a very different guise with "Out" in 1964. Anyone who wants to sneer that "experimental" writers simply lack the talent to write conventional novels, should have this book rammed down their throat. Evelyn Waugh needed a longer apprenticeship to get as good as this.
This is the same fictiverse as "The Sycamore Tree" - The Sunday Supplement and Howard Cutting (whose wife left him, and went off to South America) get passing mentions, but they aren't important. It's a world CBR could have kept going through further instalments and had a decent career out of it. Other people did quite well with less. Instead, it all ends here and the author comes back in a very different guise with "Out" in 1964. Anyone who wants to sneer that "experimental" writers simply lack the talent to write conventional novels, should have this book rammed down their throat. Evelyn Waugh needed a longer apprenticeship to get as good as this.
Read
November 3, 2023Savagely funny, with a bitter but inescapable conclusion. A great satire on our culture's 'middling.'
April 4, 2017
Easily the weakest of the 4 conventional novels. I don't quite get all the love for this one. The Dear Deceit was worlds better in every single way. CB-R took a couple steps back with this one.
Onwards to the fun stuff!
Onwards to the fun stuff!
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews