Company histories preach an archetypical Founder’s Story to the young poorish

Company histories preach an archetypical Founder’s Story to the young, poorish sales novices, from a variety of ethnic backgrounds, who are imbued with the spirit to walk into the sales jungle and emerge rich.Cheever, naturally, beats you to the comparison with Death of a Salesman, the play referred to by a sales colleague as an “abominable monstrosity”. Dissemblingly, he claims to be a writer who makes a better impression in person than on paper, but this is merely good sales technique.While he plays the ing? at product-pitching, his writerly training is quietly in evidence. He softly enunciates the aura of sorrow of the sales instructor, works for a manager with the countenance of “a man who had just murdered a chorus girl” and finds he enjoys sales. Cheever delights in being the “Oscar Wilde of the GM salesroom”, a fragrant position amid its testosterone stench.However, beyond the bonhomie lies a more urgent, quietly angry agenda, as he criticises the reluctance of free-market culture to acknowledge redundancy as a human rather than economic issue.

Despite his genial persona, his complaints against Digest chairman George Grune, who downsized the company in the mid-1990s, rumble through the book.Cheever’s account stands as the fall-guy to Barbara Ehrenreich’s more serious-minded book, Nickel and Dimed. It also recalls David Sedaris, who pursued similar “slacker” employment in Me Talk Pretty One Day and The Santaland Diaries. Like Sedaris, Cheever embraces an American tradition of melancholic, absurdist blues. He finds the lot of the hourly-paid worker a mixture of demoralised tedium and occasional exhilaration, as when he attains the highest monthly profit selling for General Motors. Even here, there is a literary antecedent, his wife points out: Harry Angstrom manages a Toyota dealership in John Updike’s Rabbit is Rich. Ben Cheever, however, does not become wealthy, though a claim to spiritual enrichment is unavoidable.The Cheever family business is writing, with novelist sister Susan and New York Times critic wife Janet Maslin complementing the Pulitzer-winning father.

Selling Ben Cheever skilfully dismantles the novelist’s hubris, providing a rare voice for the pleasures and dignities of working life while recognising that the American Dream remains a “noble falsehood”.Cheever constructs from what he refers to as a gloomy subject a thoughtful study that lacks bitterness, but not bite. By the end, you want to buy a computer, car or, even, just a sandwich from him, such are the agonies of commission-based work. Better to buy the book, and hope he negotiated a good percentage.. And this, says JR, the oil man, “is the village where they film Crossroads.” We are driving in his battered pick-up through the pretty village of Redmile in the Vale of Belvoir, on the Nottinghamshire-Leicestershire border, a flat plain of prime agricultural land fringed by a forest ridge topped with autumnal golds and browns. They think they have discovered oil beneath the heavy clays of the Vale of Belvoir, until now most celebrated as a good place to grow wheat or oilseed rape, or over which to gallop in full fox-hunting red with one of the celebrated local packs, such as the Quorn or the Belvoir, whose kennels are just up the road from Redmile, in the grounds of the ancestral home of the Duke of Rutland.

As a result, the vale’s traditional bucolic image is being threatened by the prospect of “Dallas comes to Nottingham” – it’s the nearest major town to the four sites where a Canadian oil firm has just received licences from the British government to begin drilling.To the delight of the tabloids, and the local television companies, one of the farmers whose land lies in the middle of the potential new oilfield rejoices in the initials JR, a name that became a byword for double-dealing and boardroom skulduggery in the Eighties Texas oil soap. James Reid has, as a result, found himself leaning over gates at his farm near Granby wearing a Stetson and smoking a fat cigar provided by enterprising photographers.”I’m the Oo-Aar JR,” he says with farmer-booted irony. Even the normally sober Financial Times introduced its report on how the Canadian firm is trying to raise £1m in the City to further finance the project by comparing the area with the Crazy Horse field in the Gulf of Mexico, and talking about an imminent string of gushers along the A52.Everyone wants it to be so. The Canadian firm is led by John Frey, a 69-year-old veteran oilman from Alberta in Canada who has spent more than £1m of his own money on a detailed seismic survey of the area.