June 30, 1997 Books of the Times 'The Ax': Extreme Measures in Response to Downsizing By CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT Here's a chilling little fable for the end of the millennium. Burke Devore, the 51-year-old protagonist of Donald E. Westlake's grim new thriller, "The Ax," has been downsized by Halcyon Mills, the paper company for which he has been product manager for 16 years. Burke knows paper, even the kind you eat: as he explains, "a special kind of paper-source cardboard is used in many commercial ice creams, as a binder." He could "take over almost any managerial job within the paper industry, with only minimal training in a particular specialty." But with downsizing general all over America, there are too few of those jobs for too many people. And Burke is really not quite the most qualified of candidates, not even for the job with the mill in Arcadia, N.Y., that is starting up a line in which Burke specializes. Ralph Fallon already holds that position. And if anything were to happen to Ralph, there would be others who would probably be hired ahead of Burke. So Burke -- increasingly worried about the mortgage on his Connecticut home and the welfare of his wife, Marjorie, and their teen-age children, Billy and Betsy -- decides to take extreme measures. He writes an advertisement for a trade magazine announcing that B.D. Industrial Papers of Wildbury, Conn., is looking for a manufacturing line manager. As the resumes pour into the post office box Burke has given as the address of this phony company, he winnows them in search of his most qualified competition. When he has narrowed the candidates down to six, he packs a Luger pistol he has found among his father's World War II souvenirs and sets out in his Plymouth Voyager to visit the home of the first one, Herbert Coleman Everly. When Everly comes out to get his mail, Burke aims the Luger at him and pulls the trigger. "The Luger jumps in the window space and the left lens of his glasses shatters and his left eye becomes a mineshaft, running deep into the center of the earth." This leaves five competitors to go. Then Burke will kill Ralph Fallon, and the Arcadia job will be his. You find this hard to believe? So did I at first. So does Burke himself, a basically decent man whose eyes begin to sting with tears of pity when a police detective investigating the murders shows Burke photographs of two of his victims. But as Burke proceeds with his awful plan, he keeps tightening the screws of his logic. "The equation is hard and real and ruthless. We're running out of money, Marjorie and I and the kids, and we're running out of time. I have to be employed, that's all. I'm no self-starter, I'm not going to invent a new widget, I'm not going to found my own paper mill on a shoestring. I need a job." And as he turns the screws, they bite deeper and deeper into the framework of these times. It all began with automation, Burke reflects. Automation attacked blue-collar workers, but because they were unionized "the pain of the transition was somewhat eased." But now "the child of automation," the computer, was attacking middle management, the white-collar workers, the supervisors, "and none of us are unionized." Burke continues: "This is a transition we're in now, where middle management will shrink like a slug when you pour salt on it, but middle management won't completely disappear. There will just be fewer jobs, that's all, far fewer jobs." And Burke will have one of them. With such irrefutable reasoning, Burke gradually seduces the reader, and you find yourself almost rooting for him as he works his way along "the learning curve" of murder. Besides, his bleak philosophy actually proves constructive, in a perverse sort of way. When his son, Billy, is arrested for robbing a computer store, Burke uses his new-found cynicism to get the boy out of trouble and thereby wins back the affection of his wife, who had been threatening to leave him because of his growing remoteness since becoming unemployed. Will Burke succeed at his gruesome project, or will the bloody mayhem he's committing eventually catch up with him? To answer this question is, of course, what ultimately keeps you devouring Westlake's taut prose. And in the process you can't help being infected by the biting anger of a book whose deeper message really transcends its story. As Burke muses when approaching his final crisis, "Today, our moral code is based on the idea that the end justifies the means." He continues: "The end of what I'm doing, the purpose, the goal, is good, clearly good. I want to take care of my family; I want to be a productive part of society; I want to put my skills to use; I want to work and pay my own way and not be a burden to the taxpayers. The means to that end has been difficult, but I've kept my eye on the goal, the purpose. The end justifies the means. Like the CEOs, I have nothing to feel sorry for." Jonathan Swift would have been delighted with Burke Devore's modest proposal. And readers of "The Ax" will be darkly entertained by the way he goes about, uh, executing it. Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company
