King of the Mississippi

by Mike Freedman

A biting, hilarious literary satire of war, business, and contemporary masculinity, set in the cutthroat-but-ridiculous world of management consulting

King of the Mississippi is an incisive, uproarious dissection of contemporary male vanity and delusion, centered around a "war" for dominance of a prestigious Houston consulting firm. On one side of the conflict is Brock Wharton, an old money ex-jock whose delight in telling clients to downsize is matched only by his firm conviction that people like himself deserve to run the world. On the other is Mike Fink, a newly hired wily former soldier trying to ride his veteran status to the top of a corporate world that lionizes "the troops" without truly understanding them. Brock and Mike are mortal enemies on sight, bitterly divided not only by background and class but by diametrically opposed (yet equally delusional) visions of what it means to "be a man." And as their escalating conflict spirals out of control, it will take them all the way from the hidebound boardrooms and gladiatorial football fields of Texas to the vapid and self-serving upper echelon of Silicon Valley, to the corporatized battlefield of Iraq, all the while serving as a ruthlessly funny takedown of the vacuity and empty machismo of corporate life and alpha-male culture in modern America.
Devastatingly witty, unapologetically scathing, and ultimately surprisingly moving, King of the Mississippi marks the arrival of a unique and scintillating new voice in American fiction, one that boldly punctures the myths of American manhood like no one has since the heyday of Tom Wolfe and Bret Easton Ellis.

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary, Humor

256 pages, Hardcover

First published July 9, 2019

About the author

A native Houstonian and former Green Beret, Mike Freedman completed School Board while still an MBA candidate at the Rice University Jones Graduate School of Business.

Reviews

[Vivian · Rating 2 out of 5]

While I appreciate the character development, this book is such a slog to get through. There's not much in here that makes you want to keep going, no big resolution that you're looking for.

[Greg Zimmerman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Starts off an over-the-top workplace comedy, morphs into an episodic tale of two dudes trying to destroy each other, ends as an Iraq war story. But none of them really quite work.

[Morgan Young · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 This is a great story for readers who have a deep appreciation for the absurdities of office politics :-)

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like a big blue catfish packed to the gills with schadenfreude and hyper-masculinity, King of the Mississippi is a savagely raucous novel in which no one is safe from a comic skewering. Along with Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, it will stand the test of time as one of the best satires of the War on Terror. From Special Forces gunslingers, to high society wives, to Fortune 500 consultants, to the Bayou City where they mix, mingle, and occasionally do battle, Freedman writes with great verve and authority on the failings of military and corporate cultures alike.

[George Witte · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this novel, wickedly funny and smart and fearless, a mano-a-mano battle for supremacy in the corporate world with an unforgettable dueling duo of men from very different backgrounds, and a powerful undercurrent that tunnels into masculinity, the marketing of heroism, the compromises of ambition, and much more. Last book I enjoyed this much: Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk.

[Kristin Lyders Fitzmorris · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you are a management consultant or ever hired one…you gotta read this book.

If you are in Special Forces or part of the DoD apparatus…you gotta read this book.

If you are a male of above average intelligence…you gotta read this book.

Ladies, if you can stomach the first couple intentionally jarring chauvinistic thoughts about women as expressed by the troglodyte internal dialogue of the main character…you should read this book. It will remind you to celebrate “where we were” and “where we have arrived…almost.” By design, author Mike Freedman compels readers to confront outdated crass stereotypes of feminine beauty and hyper-masculinity before shedding them all to reveal the reformed main character, Brock Wharton, at the end of his hero’s journey in this satire.

Yet Freedman does not only go after sexism, but also classism, and even what it means to be “All-American” with a clever, biting style. Everyone and everything is fair game as he pokes fun at the male arch-types of the past throughout the novel, while building to a more inclusive, self-introspective, “woke” America in the epilogue.

Freedman doesn’t apologize for a reader’s lack of knowledge about the subject matter—after all, what’s Google for? Not a book to be skimmed, this work offers a “No sh**, there I was” experience to readers as they are dropped deep into the heart of the soulless consulting industry. Complete with jargon and rituals, every sentence has been crafted for maximum impact. Beautifully written, the winding style requires readers to pay attention and to hang in there for the worthwhile message it delivers on privilege and income inequality.

[Rick · Rating 3 out of 5]

This novel has ringing endorsements from a host of well known respected authors who compare it to the work of Kingsley Amis, George Saunders and Joseph Heller. Not so fast my friend. I laughed once out loud over the entire 243 pages. Freedman portrays consultants and Houston in pretty unflattering ways and I cannot really disagree with the thrust of his arguments. I have to say i labored through the book and early on thought of just putting it down.

The reconciliation of the two main rivals Brock Wharton and Mike (King of the Missippi ) Fink acheived while bonding on a consulting assignment in war torn Iraq was a bit over the top for me.

[John Deardurff · Rating 3 out of 5]

A satire of working in a management consulting firm has our two main characters battle for office supremacy. On one side is upper-class ex-jock, Brock Wharton who finds his realm being ambushed by the low-class veteran, Mike Fink. I wanted to enjoy the book, and I am sure there is an audience who will enjoy it. I found the writing dense and difficult to decipher who was actually talking through most of the book. It was also difficult to stay in the narcissistic mind of Brock Wharton for very long.

[Chet · Rating 3 out of 5]

Being generous with a 3-star rating...the author frequently gets lost in the weeds with this book. The maxim that you can't judge a book by its cover is borne out with this book. The next read has to be better, right? Right? Is this thing on?

[Another · Rating 2 out of 5]

The upside - a strong setting.

The downside - a painful series of interactions between two examples of self important asshats. A vapid, shallow, selfish jerk vs a hyper masculine, self righteous self appointed fixer. This is the one the author calls "a real hero".

After getting halfway through I realized there are zero characters in this book I like so threw it aside.

Kudos for Houston setting. As a Houstonian for the entire 80s and then some I enjoyed that. That's why 2 stars instead of 1.

I hope the book ended with both main characters doing the world a favor and killing each other.

[Benyakir Horowitz · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book surprised me two times. Once because it was lot better than I expected it to be. Second because the epilogue fell a little bit flat after my expectations got raised. It wasn’t anything thematic about the ending that was wrong, but I wanted something harder hitting. Another problem was that it was a little bit slow reading at times. I usually don’t care about that, but this felt like a book that was particularly impacted.

Okay, well, the story. Brock’s a hotshot consultant at CCG who, against his wishes, has a new competitor. Mike is ex-special forces and seems to use that in lieu of the élite education Brock expects. He is brazen and uses CCG’s desire to have a token veteran as a means of destroying Brock and undoing CCG’s work (it’ll get explained towards the end). It gets more complicated than that, but I’m kinda tired, so I’m not. But in the beginning, it kinda reminded me of the Trump vs. Cruz dynamic in 2016. Cruz had done everything ‘right’ in the sense that he had climbed the political ladder with an education and picking-and-choosing his actions very carefully. Trump came out of nowhere and seemingly out of control to dethrone Cruz. One difference is that Brock is kind a dick and knows it, but Mike fundamentally fights for what’s right.

The book is an adept criticism of modern out-of-control capitalism and Brock’s hypocrisy, his intent hate and desire to join old money. He comes from a life of privilege that he despises too.

At the end the criticism becomes more pointed, specifically at military contractors in Iraq. The story’s set in 2014, and the last third or has Brock and Mike trying to make some sense out of the mess that war profiteers have made of Iraq (reminding me especially of Jared Kushner and his designer body armor, though, undoubtedly, the book was written before that happened).

At the end, Brock and Mike escape an ambush and don’t really accomplish anything in Iraq other than humiliating a business man completely out of his depth who is pilfering what remaining oil there is in Iraq. The epilogue has Brock actually volunteering and using his time, and both Mike and Brock, no longer enemies, teaming up to start up their own something to hopefully maybe undo some of the world’s good.

My happiest part is that, while it’s a pretty good book, it’s also a good comp. Not perfect, but okay.

[Alexandria · Rating 2 out of 5]

Even for satire this was astonishingly sexist and truly boring as an attempt to critique masculinity. Each woman is immediately introduced by her appearance (usually leading with breast size) and an evaluation of what amounts to her shrillishness. There’s one virtuous woman, but thank god she is both a former model and has removed herself from our boy’s competition. Perhaps the most egregious “character development” we get about Brock Wharton’s vapidity is his paragraph long diatribe about his pregnant wife: “His wife was slipping in the rankings. Their appearance at the CCG holiday party tonight would have to be an in-and-out operation. Wharton hypothesized that while her family might endlessly boast about their thoroughbred racing horses and knowledge of bovine breeding, his wife’s lack of any tits exposed that more ranching resources needed to be devoted to human breeding. And what was the point of having a fortune that size if not to buy a set of nice ...” This is just a prelude to a few pages later in where he snorts in disgust at his wife’s family’s failure to ensure she was hotter and virtuously says he will no longer ruminate on it to save himself from sleeping with two cocktail waitresses. But satire! However on page 161 we learn the wife is kind of smart, and at the end Mr. Wharton becomes tender hearted and self aware. Don’t worry his wife is still a cold bitch who does an okay job raising his kid albeit “with staff.” If you’re going to veil shitty writing of women characters as satire, at least do it creatively. No surprise that it appears that out of nine jacket quotes, but one is from a woman (and the last one at that).

I was going to give this 3 stars for being well written, because it is clear that the author is a good writer. However the sentences are meanderingly long and often directionless, and a great deal of the very long chunks of exposition-through-dialogue seem to have been designed only to write a fantasy about bringing some BCG guy to a war zone to straighten him out.

[Carlee · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don't think I was the target audience of this book, and overall did not find the satire particularly funny or clever. I would have liked to see more female characters in general. We only saw the female characters through the eyes of Brock Wharton, and none of them really stood on their own. I also don't quite know who the target audience of this book should be. I'm sure it was a good book for someone, just not me. Although I did laugh when Mike hijacked the Dr. Pepper meeting, and the small digs about Houston (Houston local, here).

In general, I just think satire is so hard to nail. I'm not convinced that this book is doing something new or fresh.

[Bruce · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book ended up being a disappointment for me. It starts out as an examination of two alpha males highly competetive relationship at a high-powered Houston consulting firm battling it out. Their adversarial roles are captured in a fast-paced and funny light that is quite insightful to boot. Their antagonism is well documented and their thought processes thoroughly believable. But then toward the end, the adversaries seem to quell their differences when they are sent on a commercial endeavor to Iraq. The book then devolves into a gobble-di-gook of Special Ops anaocronisms and consulting terms mishmashed into a confusing and rather pointless ending. Should have stopped 2/3 of the way through.......

[Danae · Rating 4 out of 5]

I truly enjoyed the first 2/3 of this book, but the back third was pretty deep in the weeds for me. The conflict and competition between two men, one honed by service to the country the other polished by privilege were highly entertaining. But only a strong military background could allow one to decipher the minutia of the last third. Tracking men through too many acronyms of equipment, and warcraft was hard to follow unless it was white boarded. Freedman has a promising career and he can certainly tell a story. Perhaps the next one won't be so close to his bone.

[Louis · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed the cynicism and humor, and I thought part 1 and 2 worked nicely but part 3 took a left turn into a more serious tone. It felt disjointed from the first two-thirds of the book and I began to lose interest and wondered where the story was going. But overall an enjoyable read.

[Victor Mullen · Rating 3 out of 5]

It started decent, but really struggled as the book continued. It's divided into 3 parts, all pretty different feeling.

Part 1 is "office politics". It reads like a Patrick Lencioni novel, but without the dry lessons added in. This section is pretty solid and gave me high hopes for the rest of the book.

Part 2 takes the office feud to the absurd. These two office enemies are REALLY out for each other. They sabotage and undermine each other just for the sake of it, rather than to benefit their own career. They hire private investigators. One purposely dates the other's high school girlfriend. This part climaxes with a football match, where they get into a physical fight. Not just a little scuffle, but an all out fight with biting and black eyes.

Part 3 they are sent on a business trip to Iraq. Suddenly they are best friends, because why? Iraq, I guess? The author doesn't really do much to sell it. He relies on the weird masculine trope of "They got into a fight, so now they can put their differences aside and be friends." I think that's rarely true, but it's certainly not true with the sort of vitriolic hateful relationship he outlined in the previous two parts of the book. If it was supposed to be a message about war making strange bedfellows, that did not come across at all. Part 3 climaxes with the two main characters getting into a firefight against ISIS...which is just...what?

Then there's an epilogue where
1.) Brock is suddenly a good person volunteering and helping the poor and disabled (why did he have this change of heart? who knows)
2.) Brock and Mike decide to start their own business (because I guess they have a "war buddy" bond now or something?)
3.) Brock still thinks his wife is an icy bitch. Which makes little sense since she is pretty supportive of him throughout the book, and he does seem to care about her.

Overall, it's an OK read. It leaves a lot to be desired, but it has its moments.

[Carsonmb · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mike Freedman creates characters that have this enormous, almost miraculous, emotional energy. His 2014 School Board was a joy to read, one of those rare, rollicking novels that you can’t put down not only because of the plot and writing, but because of the way Tucker “Catfish” David is forever escaping into myth. Freedman does it again in King of the Mississippi, with Mike Fink, an ex-U.S. Special Forces officer turned big-shot consultant. It took a little while to get past the initial perspective—that of an old-money Houston consultant—and the jargon that comes with that world, but Freedman manages to make this joyful in small ways, satirizing the way we fall into various acronyms and the sad myths we have recently made for ourselves. Fink is one of kind, just like Catfish. The vital energy he gives the other characters seems to speak to the unknowable and unsayable at the heart of the American character, not just our need to win, but our need to not be defeated, to not let history close over us in any fashion or form. I like to imagine Freedman’s characters forever moving west, a mess of contradictions, not afraid to fight for whatever is best in America, to gamble on a new future, as many did three hundred years ago and even more do so today. Read it, then read School Board, then read about the next strange, forgotten hero Freedman discovers on America’s bayous.

[Chris Wharton · Rating 2 out of 5]

What’s the old adage about telling a book by its cover? With an interesting-sounding proposition about a culture clash between the world of corporate business consulting and an ex-Special Forces officer (Mike Fink) in a Houston consulting firm, and some blurbs from some exceptional writers—Tim O’Brien, Karl Marlantes, Phililp Caputo, Robert Olen Butler, and Ben Fountain among them—making some exceptional comparisons— hello Twain!, hello Heller!, hello George Saunders!, hello Hunter Thompson!—I was quite looking forward to this. I was then sorely disappointed. In between some satirical takes on Southern good ol’ boy and Houston money cultures, an interesting football game, and the two main characters’ trip to Iraq and Kurdistan at the end, this went absolutely nowhere for me. Neither the supposed connection of the occasionally lively Mike Fink with the mythical “king of the Mississippi” Mike Fink nor the character of ex-Longhorn quarterback Brock Wharton as a hot-shot consultant but troubled good ol’boy are particularly well drawn, so the central premise of the book depending on these two characters doesn’t hold up very well. And if putting much of the narrative and dialog in the deadening language of consultant speak was meant as revealing parody or satire, it instead lost me in long plodding paragraphs, impeding any chance of achieving the wit and wisdom of the above named.

[Casey Street · Rating 5 out of 5]

King of the Mississippi was an enjoyable read. Though the book is set in modern Houston, it really could take place in any American boomtown. The somewhat satirical take on corporate America, the consulting world and the military fits well in today’s narrative of Southern cities who are struggling to identify exactly what they are. The characters are certainly exaggerations, but you definitely see pieces of people you interact with every day in them. The eponymous title character, Mike Fink, is a bit much, and the author’s thoughts on the military, while made in some jest I think, come across a little too strongly. Otherwise, King of the Mississippi is solid read, one that will have you smiling at times, shaking your head at others, and nodding in agreement with many of the takes on corporate consulting.

[Nick Ueber · Rating 3 out of 5]

Since it is set in Houston and I live in Houston I found the description of areas I am very familiar with and the meteorological environment I live in fun to read about. The book is described as uproariously funny but it didn’t elicit so much as a chuckle from me. None of the characters in the book are worth rooting for. While it is a parody of the ultra rich, privileged, hyper competitive individuals in business and the military, it is no doubt accurate for the most part.

I also found it difficult to follow a lot of the dialogue unless you were a management consultant yourself. I had to read some sentences more than once in order to grasp what they were trying to say and decipher their jargon.

All of that said, it was an easy, snappy 245 page read.

[David Eisler · Rating 4 out of 5]

A funny and enjoyable novel that pokes fun at both management consulting and the American culture of military veneration. It's refreshing to see an author tackle the subject of war with wit and humor, something that is generally lacking in contemporary war fiction. The two major characters - high-achieving consultant Brock Wharton and recently hired Army Special Forces veteran Mike Fink - are well-drawn and capture the essence of their archetypes well, though I think both could have had a little more depth to them. Nonetheless, this was a good antidote to many of the more depressing and overly serious war novels that I've read in the last two years.

[Eddie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Starts off well, with a very funny send-up of consulting and rich Houstonians, but there are a number of abrupt jumps to different settings or situations that get tiring by the end. Personally, I understood the consulting-ese, but struggled with some of the military terminology. I guess that's supposed to reflect the main character's confusion in Iraq, but it only added to the sense of being rushed. There are a lot of good ideas in here, maybe too many. Wharton's initial cockiness and machismo (gross but funny) being worn away through cracks of self-awareness, I could follow his transformation most of the way, but it wasn't exactly clear to me where this ended up.

[Octavia · Rating 2 out of 5]

This pains me to give such a low rating but I really, really, really struggled to finish this book. It was so smart. The research that went into the Iraq portion of the book was astounding..... but oh. dear. god... this book was so boring. I thought it would pick up but it only got more boring. Props to the author but just not my thing.

[Patrick · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was hoping this book would be more like a "thank you for consulting" in the Christopher buckley mode, but it's not quite there. I enjoyed the references to Houston, which all ringed true. I will his other book, "school board", on my reading list.

[Brent Nofziger · Rating 1 out of 5]

I couldn’t keep up with characters or their thoughts and comments. I finished it because I thought it had to get better, but it kept getting worse and harder to follow. I couldn’t wait to get done with it

[Nikol Podlacha · Rating 4 out of 5]

While true this book can be a little slow to read, I think that the story and writing is well done. The story itself and character development is entertaining if you don’t mind conversation heavy type books.

[Lone Star Literary Life · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reviewed by Michelle Newby Lancaster for Lone Star Literary Life.

[Alan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Satire or not, I didn’t have the patience for this patriarchy-centric story line. Even the Houston setting did not save it.

[Zach Wilson · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book was terrible. I basically just finished it so I could write a review on how terrible it is and to warn others not to waste their time, let mine be a sacrifice for you...