Succession

It is 1963. To pay his dying father's hospital bills, ex-Army Ranger Jake Garrison must accept another company downsizing assignment. Expert at the job, he hates the pain, and this time the target is the iconic Kensington Typewriter Company. Worse, the paymaster will be "vulture capitalist" Charles Carnusty, whom Garrison suspects of seducing his wife, Diana. She is a top executive at Colepool Publishers, another nineteenth century icon, which recently made the mistake of going public and is feeling twentieth century financial pressures. Diana blames Garrison for failing to make her pregnant. As Garrison overturns stones inside Kensington, he meets a cast of executives, workers and wives who have given their careers to a company that allowed itself to become trapped in a doomed technology. Diana becomes more frigid; their circle of her literary and artistic friends, all pursuing their own versions of the 1960s American dream, turn distant and hostile. Racism, feminism, poverty, corporate outsourcing, the line between vulture and venture capitalism all come into focus as President Kennedy is gunned down in Dallas and Kitty Genovese is stabbed to death in Kew Gardens. When Diana unexpectedly becomes pregnant, Garrison is convinced he is not the father. An abrasive look at the era of "Mad Men," Succession's cast of vividly drawn characters speak a dialogue one reviewer called "laced with testosterone in a novel whose every page has a distinctive, almost uncomfortable realism." "Succession" is Lobsenz's second novel. His first was the Harper Prize winning and best selling "Vangel Griffin."