About Paranoia

Joseph Finder on the Practicality of Paranoia -- A Conversation With PW Daily

Joseph Finder was surprisingly candid in conversation, considering his latest thriller is entitled Paranoia (St. Martin's, $24.95), a book to which PW gave a starred review and called "the real deal: a thriller that actually will keep readers up way past their bedtimes." In this book, the author of High Crimes, Zero Hour and The Moscow Club takes a classic cold war plot, a la John le Carre, and sets it in an American consumer electronics company. He spoke by untapped telephone with PW Daily editor Ed Nawotka:

PW: You're a former intelligence officer, an expert on the cold war and Soviet espionage techniques, so here's a riddle: what do the KGB, CIA, and corporate America have in common?
JF: There're intelligence wars going on between corporations; people are struggling to steal intellectual property and information. Increasingly, as corporate profits are derived from technology and advances in technology, companies are becoming more and more bold. A surprising number of corporate intelligence directors come from the CIA. This setting had not been done and a vast segment was ripe for fiction.

PW: How so? Most people I know who work in cubicles don't necessarily think of their working lives as dramatic.
JF: True, but work has become a dominant aspect of American life and this is where people live--a good book on this topic is Arlie Russell Hochschild's The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work--and yet this was a setting no one else was writing about. I was so inspired and excited by my friends who work at Cisco, HP, Apple, where I went to research. They have these unbelievable stories. Novels that take place in corporations tend to be about financial intrigue. And there are plenty of novels about the profession of law, but the largest percentage of people work in the business world.

PW: Were there other circumstances that made you think the time was right?
JF: We're in a surveillance culture. We all send e-mail, and most people who work for corporations forget that their e-mail can be monitored. There's a lack of privacy. It's harder and harder to hide out. It's easier to find people. And as I was writing Paranoia, the Enron scandal broke. Since then, there's been a culture change in the country: CEOs who were once worshipped are now demonized.

PW: And now we have Donald Trump's TV show The Apprentice, which could have easily featured Adam Cassidy, the protagonist of your book, as a contestant.
JF: One of the things Adam learns in the book is that information is not as important as the rhetoric. He learns how easy it is to create appearances, manipulate people and get ahead, by social engineering. Take a look at Horatio Alger's stories, which I had thought were rags to riches until I picked one up. They are actually about striving young executives--they're like Adam.

PW: Why, in your opinion, has business never been a popular topic for fiction? It is immensely popular as a genre for self-help books.
JF: In most novels these days, characters have jobs the way they have eye color--they've got to have one, but it's not really the point, and there's an obligatory air to it, don't you think? The state of being unemployed, as in the new Colin Harrison [The Havana Room] or in Walter Mosley [The Man in My Basement], is fraught with significance. But the idea that office politics and ambition, loyalty and betrayal in the workplace might be a source of anguish or contentment--as they are for countless Americans--is somehow deemed bathetic, ignoble, unworthy of a high-minded hero. And I think far too many writers miss the point that this is where a majority of Americans live.

PW: Many of the characters in Paranoia have shelves loaded with business self-help books, but they don't seem to do them much good. What is your opinion of that genre?"
JF: I love all those books from Who Moved My Cheese? and Good to Great to Julius Caesar's and Machiavelli's business tips. Most are ridiculous, but if you go into any cubicle in a high tech corporation, you'll see vast numbers of them. But they are not self-help books. They are fantasy books. They are premised on the fact that you are running this corporation. You read Who Moved My Cheese?, and you can have this fantasy of fulfillment, success and power. There's a hunger in the business world to conceptualize what they are doing and to ennoble what we're doing by using quotes from Shakespeare, Churchill and F.D.R. to turn business into a heroic epic. But the truth is, these books just aren't very practical.