Paris 1975 (Uk)

The story of how one man takes on big business-and wins. The novel begins and ends at the headquarters of Trask International, a giant conglomerate devoted to the manufacture of everything from self-cleaning can openers to contraceptive devices. Inside this bastion of American enterprise, Donald L. Mancha toils thanklessly as chief speechwriter to board chairman William E. Hobson. An otherwise faithful servant, Mancha maintains his sanity against the stultifying onslaughts of corporate bureaucracy by drafting phony memoranda for his co-workers and comic messages for the suggestion box. Outside of work, he tells his troubles to his faithful retriever, Moriarity, and spends his affection on a lovely widow-also his landlady-named Marge Tremler. This peaceful existence is interrupted, however, when Mancha is caught in a compromising position with his attractive summer intern who, unknown to him, is the daughter of his Draconian boss. He is demoted, by the chairman to a job as an hourly worker stuffing envelopes in the Trask mail room. Mancha decides to quit for good, but not before he stands Hobson's empire on its corporate head. The inscrutable Mancha rises to the occasion with a Master plan whose end is to completely confound the company's operation and turn Trask over to its workers. The mayhem culminates with hordes of militant Traskers descending on the company's annual board meeting. This is a hilarious parody of life inside the corporation, emerging as a triumph of individual resourcefulness over corporate authority. It is sacrilegious, entertaining, very human-and very funny.