Easy and Hard Ways Out: A Novel

by Robert Grossbach

An underachieving engineer building a fighter plane faces a life-changing decision in this Vietnam-era novel perfect for fans of Kurt Vonnegut, Joshua Ferris, and Joseph Heller.
 This furious, slapstick tale has been praised by the New York Times as one of the “best and brightest” novels about the Vietnam War. We follow the travails of Harvey Brank and his fellow employees, all undrafted malcontents working in a spectacularly small-minded, almost Kafkaesque engineering company. Assigned to build a fighter plane and drawn into office intrigues, Brank faces impossible demands. His wife, despairing of his patchy employment history and restlessness, hopes against hope that Brank won’t get himself fired this time. But what do you do when everything conspires against your vision of a decent, peaceable life?

Easy and Hard Ways Out is a blunt, freewheeling look at the men who stay home during wartime—a story about the everyday, with a timeless moral at its heart. 

245 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1974

About the author

Robert Grossbach worked for many years at a firm that manufactures electronic components, and wrote from experience. His novels include Someone Great (1971), Never Say Die (1979),and A Shortage of Engineers (2001). Grossbach lives in Commack, New York.

Reviews

[zxvasdf · Rating 5 out of 5]

I didn't mean to read this book, I swear. I'm still getting used to my kindle, and was coming off the graveyard shift. I don't know what I was going to read, but it was a happy accident I selected Easy and Hard Ways Out.

The bastard child Catch-22 and Upstairs Downstairs, Grossbach's book explores the exploits of engineers in the 60's as they design an aircraft for an lucrative Navy contract. An assortment of engineers bring their neuroses to the table, each rationalizing and passing the buck when a part is found to be defective on the final end product. And running a thin thread throughout the narrative is the story of a pilot doing a bombing run on the Cong on the very plane designed by Auberbauch Labs.

The premises is very similar to Catch-22, only the catch is to admit error equals unemployment, which, for those engineers with decades long tenure, is unthinkable. Engineer Brank, who fits best the role of protagonist, is responsible for the Yig part itself, and has been since unable to get a relatively cheap epoxy that would correct the issue; it's since been rejected by Shipping for bullshit reason after bullshit reason, and when the deadline looms, he's faced with a morality crisis.

This is the way out Grossbach writes about. For each of those engineers, a moral code reigns, from malleable to rigid (not unlike the behavior of the inferior epoxy Brank works with), and those pilots who struggle with personal feelings about the war, there is a way out whether they like it or not.

[James Lundy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ethics. How to be ethical when you're the only one who cares and it would come at a great personal expense. Back in College my girlfriend at the time told me to quit my co-op job with General Motors because they hadn't divested from South Africa (this was the early 80s). I did not; it would have meant dropping out of college. I figured news of my departure was not going to be the talk of every Bantustan or rush the end aparthied. So I finished college, left GM, and now am in a position to actually make a change that affects more people than just myself. Did I do the right thing? In the big scheme of things yes but in the details no. And that's what this book is about: the easy and hard ways out of an ethical dilemma. It's very funny also. A bonus. And it speaks to me as an engineer.

[Pamela · Rating 1 out of 5]

As painful as it was, I did manage to finish this book.

There were too many characters introduced at the same time.

There were too many "jokes" that just weren't funny.

There were too many situations that were beyond ridiculous.

Just flat out badly written, badly plotted, and ultimately unenjoyable.