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Kirkus Book Review

A sand-up of England's commercial demimonde that doesn't make it either. Hapless hero/narrator Gordon Bennett is, in British parlance, a bit of a mug. Throughout a checkered career in consumer credit sales, the marketing of foundation garments, speed-reading instruction, and other risible enterprises, he is forever being clobbered by wilier types. Once, he's left holding the bag for a rascally pair whose plans for a European chain of hair-weaving salons are dashed by an exposÉ in a Dutch magazine (called, ahem, Pandora). He's enough of a nit, though, to come to grief on his own. Peddling men's suits door-to-door, he's too diffident to take actual inseam measurements (i.e., from crotch to shoe top); the result: trousers six inches too short. (In a not-unlike vein, his mobile-canteen career comes to an abrupt end when an incontinent horse lets loose in the food-service section of the firm's one vehicle.) With nothing left to try, Bennett heeds the advice of a clerk at the unemployment office and sets up shop as a management consultant; the text ends with a burlesque ad soliciting business on the basis of the poor duffers' vast experience. Some occasional wispy humor; but mostly witless. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.