Tale of Horror

THE JOB HUNTER by Allen R. Dodd Jr. 195 pages. McGraw-Hill. $4.95.

Everybody knows about those dark and stilly nights when a man's mainspring gets wound too tight; he tosses and weighs his unpaid bills against his bank balance, turns and divides his life insurance by the number of years his kids still have in school. Then, if he is really determined to feel miserable he usually has a final chilling thought: "What would I do if I lost my job?"

Author Dodd, a senior editor of Printers' Ink, an advertising trade journal, has written an apparently unpretentious and ostensibly factual little book about what happened to one man when this insomniac fancy became a grim reality. What the story really is quite simply, is an artfully contrived little masterpiece of unrelieved and mounting terror.

Dodd's hero is a high-salaried Manhattan advertising executive, approaching 45, with all the hallmarks and accouterments that fiction rigidly and unimaginatively attributes to a successful adman: a split-level home in Connecticut (mortgaged), a wife (bright and loyal), two children (one a problem), and two automobiles (one foreign). When he is first eased out of his job in an executive power play, he is not particularly worried. But he soon learns that even in an affluent society there are not enough executive suites to go around, and, besides, that a middle-aged man who loses his place in the great pecking order is viewed with suspicion wherever he tries to break in again.

For twelve months the Job Hunter makes his grim rounds with a steadily increasing sense of humiliation, as his old associates avoid him, as he learns that pinching pennies is no substitute for earning money, as he finally reaches the point where he would take almost anything, only to learn that to be a baker or bartender, a welder or a waiter, is not simply to have such a job but to possess certain skills and experience. There is no happy ending. The Job Hunter finally gets a job, not as good as the one he had, but not a bad job. But he has changed and he knows it, for while his return to affluence is possible, he can never recapture his innocence. After being brought face to face with humiliating and harsh realities, he simply is no longer attracted by the old incentives. And that is the most punishing blow of all.

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