Falling Sideways [Kindle Edition]

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

Thomas E. Kennedy's FALLING SIDEWAYS, the second novel of his COPENHAGEN QUARTET to be published in the U. S., made me wish that the next book in the series will get to these shores sooner rather than later. Filled with both subtle and not-so-subtle satire, it is the rarest of novels, one that appeals to the intellect and ultimately the heart. There is much that will make you smile-- as Mr. Kennedy delights us with the many foibles of these characters-- but just as much to make you mull over and over what really matters in this short time we have here. After all, the first words we read in this strange-- in the best sense of the word-- and beautiful novel are lines from Philip Larkin: ". . . we should be careful/Of each other, we should be kind/While there is still time."

The novel is set in contemporary Copenhagen. Several of the characters-- Frederick Breathwaite, Harald Jaeger, Claus Clausen, Brigitte Sommer and Martin Kampman-- are employees of The Tank (we never find out just what this corporation does). Most of the remaining characters are either spouses or children of these four. Additionally there are Jalal al-Din, the owner of Dom of the Rock Key & Heel Bar, his wife and son. (As I read again and again about the Dom, I asked myself how did Kennedy know so much about shoe repair.) Although this writer's chief targets are materialism (Jes Breathwaite tells Adam Kampman that his father was "raised cuckold but lost his father's faith and converted to materialism") and the shark-infested contemporary workplace ("Kill or be killed") where CEO's are hired to fire and concerned only with profit-and-loss statements, no subject is off-limits: the hypocrisy of parents, sleeping with married co-workers--even if it takes ten years to score, surfing the internet for sex while at work, discrimination against people who may not look like you or live someplace else (Kampman does not trust the Irish), and people who do not read, to name a few. There is a delightful passage when Jaeger remembers a conversation he was privy to between Breathwaite and an American couple, "the male half of whom had been trained as an astronaut," who read LASSIE to his wife in bed. The wife wants to know what Breathwaite has read lately. He replies that he has just read Neruda's memoir, someone the uninformed American woman has never heard of. Breathwaite tells her that Neruda is a Chilean poet who won the Nobel Prize in 1971. She finds that "cool."

Mr. Kennedy it seems can do anything with words. I knew I was in for a reading treat when he makes a verb out of "slipper" in the first chapter. His little run on bras, to Maidenform bras, to maiden to maidenhead (p. 264) is a touch of genius. Or how about this sentence: "It has been raining all day, and the sky hung like a marbleized gray ceiling, low over the city." Then there is the delicious line when Breathwaite can "see clear up to Christmas."

After I finished this novel, I reread chapter 6 ("The Mumble Club"), the last chapter and the first chapter. "The Mumble Club"-- that could almost stand alone as a brilliant short story-- is pivotal to most of what happens later in the novel. The first chapter takes on a whole new meaning-- without revealing too much of the plot-- after you have read the last chapter. What I suppose I'm trying to say is that Mr. Kennedy is a master storyteller but he respects his reader's intelligence.

Frederick Breathwaite ultimately is a character whom-- even if Colm Toibin, a writer I revere, would tell me that it is not my job as a reader to like-- I think I do, or at least on some level I understand him. I have known too many Breathwaites or too many people afraid of becoming a Breathwaite. And Mr. Kennedy saves some of his most beautifully poignant passages for him. Near the end of the novel, he, puffing on a "half-smoked apostolado," thinks of his mother and father "years ago, attending a one-man Victor Borge show on Broadway. When? It was the mid-fifties, late fifties, maybe. When he was a child. He remembered them coming home afterward in a taxi. . . Mom in fashionable black, a white fur pillbox hat on her pretty head, flushed with happiness, so amused at the Dane's monologue. . . Strange it seemed to him that that had been back in the United States, land of weak coffee, thin beer, and surly cabdrivers, in New York City, in Sunnyside, Queens, some five decades before, when he was a boy, and now he sat on Victor Borge Place in Copenhagen, fifty years and eight thousand miles away. His beautiful, unfaithful mother was dead, his idealistic, compassionate father, the amusing sardonic Victor Borge. . . All dead." This moving passage, in a strange way is reminiscent of James Joyce's "The Dead."

Finally FALLING SIDEWAYS is Mr. Kennedy's homage to Copenhagen, a city he obviously loves. It shows on practically every page of this thoughtful novel.