If you’re a fan of AMC's "Mad Men," you’re going to like Ben Purkert’s debut novel, "The Men Can’t Be Saved."
It’s about an overly confident copywriter named Seth Taranoff who is trying to recapture the success he had with an ad that went viral. But “The Men Can’t Be Saved” is about much more than Taranoff's efforts to rediscover his glory days. The book also explores redemption, toxic masculinity, addiction and spirituality.
The central question is: What do our jobs do to our souls? "The Men Can’t Be Saved" is funny, smart and gives you a lot to think about — both while you’re reading and long after you’ve finished reading.
And Purkert knows this world. Before he became a poet and a novelist, he worked as a copywriter.
"Coming out of college, I really didn't know what to do," he told WPR's "BETA."
"I wanted to be a published author. I didn't want to be a copywriter at an ad agency or a branding agency. But as I started looking at job postings and I bumped my head against the reality — which is that college grads need to find a job — it seemed that this was one of the ways that I could take what I loved about my English education and apply it to business and make some money and pay off some loans. It was a practical decision. It wasn't a creative one."
When we think of advertising, we tend to think of the "Mad Men" era. So, how have things changed since that time?
Purkert said he started working at the agency around the time when "Man Men" debuted. He and his colleagues would talk about the show, and about everything that had changed since the 1960s and all the things they no longer recognized as part of the industry.
"But then we would talk about the more interesting thing, which was everything that hadn't changed, and a lot of the electricity of the environment, a lot of the big personalities, the big egos. But also the toxicity, the ways in which underlings...were just treated like trash, whether it was (by) the clients or the creative directors."
"And the bigger the ego on some level, the further you got in that world of business. And so if you squinted, it didn't feel that different from the 'Mad Men' era to today. And so I wanted to write a book that examined that a little bit, all the ways in which this culture, even as it tells itself that it's a highly progressive environment, maybe hasn't evolved in the way that it likes to say it has," Purkert said.
Purkert describes his protagonist Taranoff as "one of these people who has a pretty overinflated sense of himself."
The book is written in first person, and Taranoff's riding high when the readers meet him, Purkert explained. The tagline he wrote for an obscure brand of adult diapers just went viral, and because of that, Taranoff expects to make partner at the firm.
"And as the book progresses, we pretty quickly see that his vision of grandeur for himself is not going to be realized. And in fact, he's going to have a pretty steep downfall even within the first few chapters. And what's interesting to me about Seth is the extent to which he does not see himself — but the characters around him, they do see him."
"And so as the reader, you move through an experience where on the one hand you get the PR department of Seth, you get Seth telling the reader what he sees for himself. But then you have these other characters who kind of splash him with cold water constantly, and that way in which — not men exclusively — all of us can delude ourselves or sometimes not examine ourselves or see ourselves clearly. I wanted to look at that phenomenon in the book."
The big question that permeates "The Men Can't Be Saved" is what do our jobs do to our souls? What does Purkert think the answer to this question is?
"For me, writing this novel over the course of a decade, that was the biggest job I've ever done," he said. "And it was, I want to say, healthy for my soul. It was unhealthy for some of my relationships. But for my soul, I felt deeply fulfilled writing this book. But then there are other kinds of jobs where it's 9 to 5, but it stretches way beyond the five, and it starts to feel endless. And you don't really have a sense of purpose. And I think that is deadening to the soul. I think that it's really the kind of work that leads to a repression of self and then a sort of resentment that gets pushed out into the world."