Motor City - Hardcover

Corporate intrigue at Buick in the early 1950's, by a columnist for the Greensboro (N.C.) News and Record. There's a lot of plot here, but basically this is a sturdy first novel about a brash new manager for Buick, Ted Mackey, installed in 1954 to ``beat out Plymouth'' for the number three sales spot. No Toyotas in evidence; America is still basking in its triumph over Japan, and Ford and Chevy are one and two. Mackey has a beautiful mistress and, like everyone else, lives life to the hilt: the cars can't be big enough, and you can smoke all the cigarettes you want, and no one worries about cholesterol. Mackey lines up Marilyn Monroe, newly married to Joe DiMaggio, for an ad campaign, and then manhandles 500,000 Buicks through the assembly lines. He does indeed beat Plymouth, but, as a microcosm of the McCarthy-inspired paranoia abroad in the land, he worries unreasonably that the plans for an exciting new model (rather like a Corvette) will be stolen by rivals, and the project sours. Moreover, his mistress is unhappy, and his wife, another harbinger of the future, defies him to the point of liberation. Mackey is demoted, and a safe functionary, a carbon copy of bland President Eisenhower, replaces him. Morris's achievement is to show the excess and the repression of the 1950's simultaneously, and to meditate on why such reckless prosperity couldn't last. Marilyn Monroe coos down the page and shows herself to be rather a good businesswoman. And the American love affair with the car, nowadays a strained marriage, is admirably done. Reminiscent of the early novels of Herman Wouk: old-fashioned, sexy, and with a plot just short of overwrought. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Steeped in famliar icons and referents of the 1950s, from Levittown to Chesterfield cigarettes, this ingenious, swift and diverting debut casts a sardonic shadow of commentary forward to the 1990s. The setting is Detroit, 1954, where General Motors' Buick design team vies directly with the Plymouth division. Ted Mackey, Buick's power-hungry general manager, enlists his adulterous lover, car designer Claire Hathaway, as an in-house spy while he obsesses over Marilyn Monroe, whom he hopes will star in Buick's ad campaign. Meanwhile, GM styling chief Harvey Pearl tracks down his old Japanese flame, a Hiroshima bombing survivor who undergoes plastic surgery. Plot tangents enable the author, a columnist for the Greensboro (N.C.) News and Record , to cleverly work in cameos of Monroe, Joe DiMaggio, Jack Kerouac, LBJ, Ray Kroc, Vladimir Nabokov, Robert Oppenheimer, Miles Davis and many more. Although the '50s collage sometimes wears thin, Morris displays the zealous detachment of a sociologist as he exposes fissures in the decade's as is, should be '50s with possessive s, whiich would be awkward bland materialism, exploring issues from tokenism in corporate hiring to the CIA's dirty tricks in Central America.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.