A novel approach to business

INNOVATION:There have been some great novels set in a commercial context, but few that have had business as the driving force of the narrative.

Picture the scene: I'm one of 200 people sitting down to dinner in the ballroom of a posh London hotel. All around me, disarmingly articulate thirty-something women are wolfing down lamb cutlets and Chilean chardonnay, while on stage they get ready to announce the winner of the Romantic Novelist of the Year Award.

I'm not supposed to be here. Not really.

I've been given a late invitation, on the back of an interview I did with the author Cathy Kelly, which ran in the Saturday Magazine of The Irish Times a few weeks back, and, well, the public relations people have got their wires crossed and I didn't see it as my role to uncross them.

To my left sits the head of a major book publisher, to my right a leading literary agent. They, like everyone else in the room, are seeking the next big thing and the conversation shifts to listing possible new book genres. Misery lit, loser lit, chick lit, real crime, YA (young adult) - they are all becoming saturated; where's the growth, the buzz?

"What about business?" says Scary Agent. "Why are there no good novels about business?"

"Oh God, yeah," says Posh Publisher. "Find someone who can do for business what John Grisham has done for the law and you'll write your own cheques."

In the film of this moment, I clear my throat and pitch him the great business novel of the 21st century. As I finish, Posh Publisher reaches inside his dinner jacket and reveals a multi-million-dollar contract, placing it on the table and smiling, and hands me a gold Mont Blanc fountain pen.

Make no mistake, biz lit is the great missing genre of the book trade, one that has long held the promise of delivering a loyal audience of affluent men - a much-under-served literary constituency.

Currently, the market is dominated by biographies, such as Alan Greenspan's recent tome, or quasi-academic studies such as The Long Tail, The Second Bounce of the Ball or The Tipping Point. Add to this the hundreds of thousands of words written under the banner of self-help, and the aisles are full to bursting.

But fiction? Not yet.

There have been some great novels set in a commercial context, but few that have had business as the driving force of the narrative.

Twenty years or so ago, at a similar time in the business cycle, Tom Wolfe wrote The Bonfire of the Vanities, an epic that captured what it was like to live and breathe on the trading floors of Wall Street in the 1980s. Wolfe created Sherman McCoy, one of the self-proclaimed 'Masters of the Universe' - a phrase that gains relevance with every passing year. But although the book has many things to say about corporate America, it's really about the social and political soup that is New York.

Other great writers have used business as a hell from which to escape: John Updike's Rabbit Got Rich, or Something Happened, Joseph Heller's depiction of a seemingly successful businessman who finds himself trapped in the middle of a big corporation.

But while novelists have been quiet, Hollywood has a better recent track record. The Insider, with Russell Crowe and Al Pacino, skewered the tobacco industry over the course of two hours; Oliver Stone's Wall Street, with Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko, created one of the great business characters, one which came to define a decade. It's this calibre of storytelling that publishers want within the covers of a novel.

The scandals of Enron and Worldcom; the behaviour of Big Oil; the dotcom rise, fall and rise again - all of these have been populated by compelling characters playing out scarcely believable plot lines. Great stories, but it is journalists, economists and film-makers who are telling them.

And maybe that's the problem.

Philip Roth, arguably America's finest living writer, famously lamented that real life was becoming more interesting than the worlds he was trying to create. "The actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures daily that are the envy of any novelist," said Roth in 1961.

Meanwhile, my own personal struggle toward literary greatness continues.

Cut to a scene set in a dingy bedsit: an unshaven man sits at a kitchen table staring at the ticking cursor on his laptop screen, head in hands. Over his shoulder, we see the words Chapter One, followed by a solitary sentence. "The office was full of people, some of whom wore suits"