Falling Sideways [Hardcover]

When I started "Falling Sideways" - I thought its would be a book about either office politics or greedy corporate downsizing and the effects on the employees....and I take full responsibility for that mistaken assumption.

The book jacket describes this as "empathetic"...but I would characterize it exactly the opposite. I found almost all of the characters to be completely self-centered...and in the words of another reviewer, filled with "egocentric callousness". There was very little in these characters that I could find either interesting or remarkable. As their deepest thoughts seemed to vacillate between their bowel movements (or lack thereof) and their genitals...I lost interest pretty quickly.

Again, this is probably my fault because of unrealistic expectations, but I just didn't see the point of this story. I did find one shining bit that I did mark as noteworthy.

"Breathwaite closed Kampman's door behind him and moved slowly along the hall, hand in his pocket, stirring the coins there. He remembered then how his own father used to do that and how the sound of dimes and nickels and quarters and fifty-cent pieces clicking against one another had seemed wondrous to him when he was a boy. The wonder of money in the possession of adults."

Very descriptive and evocative - and the one image I will take from this book.

Author Thomas Kennedy in his first book, "Falling Sideways: A Novel" attempts a satire based in the workplace. The novel tells the story of Tank, which is the company that characters such as Fredrick Breathwaite, Martin Kampman and Harald Jaeger call their workplace.

We have Breathwaite, who is a high-ranking employee of the company, whose only dream and desire in life is to further the future of his son Jes, who happens to want no part of his father's dreams for him. On the other hand, we have Harald Jaeger, who is estranged from his wife and children, but despite his misgivings in his personal and love-life, he seems to be succeeding at Tank. And then, there's the cold, and hard-edged Martin Kampman, the CEO of the company who is down-sizing in order to keep Tank running efficiently.

Because it was written as a satire, Kennedy's characters are mostly dark. They are not very personable, and although some narrative comes from their friends and family, the reader rarely makes a connection at an emotional level. On a cerebral level, this book is definitely a cleverly penned novel. Ultimately, this book had a few key high-points, and a few low-points as well. I did enjoy reading it, however, so if you read the synopsis and find it to be to your liking, go for it. For me, it was a good book, highlighting interesting situations in the workplace, but not a memorable book that had characters with which I could connect.

In the second novel of the Copenhagen Quartet to be published in the US, American expatriate Thomas E. Kennedy shows his immense versatility, writing a totally different kind of novel from In The Company of Angels (2010), the first novel of the quartet. In The Company of Angels is a powerfully dramatic story of a man who suffered several years of torture under Gen. Augusto Pinochet in Chile before arriving, physically and emotionally ravaged, at a Copenhagen rehabilitation facility which treats victims of political torture. In this new novel, Kennedy provides a vision of a totally different side of Copenhagen in a totally different style of writing, broadening his overall themes and his depiction of this city. Here he focuses on the business world of one company, establishing a set of characters whose business and personal lives become so intertwined that the characters fail to grow or even recognize who they really are.

In fifty-three individual episodes, the most important main characters, who illustrate business stereotypes, gradually come to see the limitations of their lives, and some even prepare to make changes. Ultimately, these characters deal with the themes of love and death, freedom and confinement, and the worldly and the spiritual, though for several of them the emphasis here is primarily on the worldly. Copenhagen itself becomes the equivalent of a character here, too, as it continues to reveal itself ever more fully as a vibrant force, for better or worse, in the personal lives of its residents. Over the course of one week in autumn, three businessmen from "the Tank" and their families reveal their dependence upon their business environment--in addition to their own intellectual and spiritual ignorance and emotional vacuums.

It is not until they are forced to confront issues of who they really are and where they are going that some of them begin to grow beyond their stereotypical behavior to become interesting individuals struggling with life's realities. Among the main characters, is Frederick Breathwaite, an American in his fifties, who has been the public face of the Tank for years. He has a devoted wife and a bright twenty-one-year-old son Jes, who has given up college to work at a shop that makes keys and repairs shoes. Harald Jaeger, divorced from an angry wife, is a serial philanderer who has recently received a promotion to a high management position. Martin Kampman, the Tank's CEO, has been hired to "clean house" and reduce expenses by firing long-term employees, which he proceeds to do. He is the father of Adam Kampman, an alienated seventeen-year-old who finds that he has more in common with the non-conforming Jes Breathwaite and his counterculture life than he has with his parents. As these characters interact, they raise questions of honesty and ethics, the need for self-realization, the importance of the spiritual (through religion, philosophy, and literature), and most of all, the importance of true love.

Filled with observations about particular places and institutions in Copenhagen, the novel is laden with a variety of symbols and motifs--from literature, art (especially sculpture), jazz, the seasons, the spectre of death, and even a ubiquitous sausage cart. Major themes flit in, out, and through of the lives of characters, who do not always recognize their importance. Kennedy has written an unusual book with multiple main characters, none of whom, at the beginning of the novel, are self-aware or unique. As the themes unfold, however, some of these characters grow and escape their own limitations, becoming more human and less self-centered, and giving the novel a lasting thematic resonance. Mary Whipple

In the Company of Angels: A Novel