Word: binging
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...with a music degree from Loyola University and a smattering of experience with regional companies, he tried out for the Met's Auditions of the Air, billing himself as Charles Anthony Caruso. He won the auditions but lost the name: the Met's then general manager Rudolf Bing convinced him that it would be prudent not to invite comparisons with the legendary tenor...
Here to remedy that is Stanley Bing, whose roundly entertaining and surprisingly touching novel, You Look Nice Today (Bloomsbury; 291 pages), is set almost entirely in the carpeted corridors of a large, faceless multinational conglomerate. Bing (the name is a pseudonym) writes a column for FORTUNE magazine (published by Time Inc., as is TIME), but he also has a day job as an executive at a major corporation. Thus he knows whereof he writes...
There you have the plot of You Look Nice Today, and it's the least interesting thing about it. Bing could have gone for a balanced, ambiguous, what-is-justice-really kind of tale, but he didn't. He made Harb a good guy and CaroleAnne an unsympathetic harpy--and anyway, sexual harassment doesn't have the crackle that it had back in the days of, say, Michael Crichton's Disclosure. The pleasure of Bing's novel lies in his masterful, merciless evocation of the executive milieu--the lunches, the banter, the petty slights, the Scotch-soaked male bonding. "Keep...
...Bing is adept at sketching that surface, but he's not afraid to plunge his spoon into those creamy depths. What happens when a company man like Harb is yanked out of his cozy corporate cubby and thrown back on resources of introspection he hasn't used for decades? "He had been a man with a job, a huge title and many, many things to do," Bing writes. "Now it was full daylight on a weekday, and he had no tie on." You Look Nice Today is a comic novel with a tragic heart, and for a portrait of corporate...
...this, as they've always been: a little optimistic, a little overexcited and a little into just having a good time. Maybe we took small cultural differences--new slang, new fashions, new music--and, as our parents did, misinterpreted them. The Idol team is already planning a Bob Hope--Bing Crosby--style buddy musical comedy for Ruben Studdard and Clay Aiken, the winner and runner-up of the second season of Idol. It might turn out that you can't lose money underestimating the niceness of teens. --By Joel Stein