The Beautiful Bureaucrat

This would have been a 5-star short story. Not enough impact over the 170+ pages that it was.

It's a story too smart for it's own good, or at least too smart for me. An existential novel about predestination, bureaucratic work, being a small cog in a big machine. Phillips manages to be at turns funny while capturing the suffocating, claustrophobic, soul-deadening existence of (office) life. Maybe knowing the trick of it, the story deepens in meaning on subsequent readings but here I simply felt it was a clever short story lengthened to be a somewhat plodding novel.

The author wants to write like DeLillo. Not so much.