Month: June 2020

Plausible Deniability
Robert Gilbert
Piscataqua Press
paperback: $16.99
KIndle: $4.99. Free with Kindle Unlimited

Plausible Deniability is a novel for our time—a time of corporate corruption and a widespread loss of personal integrity.  Author Robert Gilbert presents us with Pete Wendell, a man verging on middle age who trades a respectable job as a reporter at The Wall Street Bulletin (aka Wall Street Journal) for public relations work. But the move also entails trading his integrity for a $140,000 a year salary.

Pete has grown up in New Canaan, Connecticut, a wealthy New York suburb in a family with a cold father and an alcoholic mother subject to fits of depression. His father was CEO of a major oil corporation and unfaithful to his wife, whose death apparently leaves father and son unmoved. Pete has grown up without his father’s approval and is disinherited at the instigation of his step-mother. Nothing he does, no matter what he achieves, can win his father’s approval.

Early on,” Pete tells the reader, “I stopped trying to meet the expectations of my father, whose management training taught him that withholding praise increases employees’ performance, if not a son’s. Yet he retained one unbroken grip on my ambitions. I coveted his lifestyle and adopted his basis for happiness—acquire more.”

That is a strong motive for returning to New Canaan, a town he doesn’t seem to have cared for, and buying a house with Libby, his wife, whom he met at the Bulletin. Pete is now in corporate communications at the country’s largest computer manufacturer. His wife tells him he’s writing puff pieces, propaganda. He tells her he’s not being dishonest, to which she replies, “You’re being dishonest with yourself.”

His boss asks him how to deal with a reporter at the Bulletin over a a potentially hazardous product that was recalled for giving some users electrical shocks. The boss fudges the truth and a possible nightmare is averted. Pete’s reaction is between “elation and shame.”

With skillful narration, Gilbert lays the ground for the heart of the novel. First, Pete’s wife is killed by a hit and run driver, and a bit later, he is fired. Then he’s diagnosed with Parkinson’s and afterwards lands communications work with a firm that dispenses how-to wisdom to corporate managers who know what their fate will be if company shares fall. We’re now into the heart of the book, which gives us relentlessly aggressive characters lacking moral compass and conscience.  As Pete becomes enmeshed in their world, he continues to compromise himself. Still mourning over his wife’s death, struggling to pay his mortgage, and still carrying the burden of his father’s indifference, he drinks heavily and comes to work hungover while his self-respect sinks lower.

His job calls for him to fudge or distort or twist the truth just enough to b.s. the journalist or whomever he’s b.s.ing. Hence the title: Plausible Deniability.

Pete’s passage through hell is believable and painful. Yes, there is a turnaround for this character, or at least we think he may have finally gotten a grip on himself, but Gilbert promises nothing.

This is the kind of novel you can’t write unless you’ve been there.