Few writers have a better handle on the craziness of modern capitalism than James P. Othmer, whose 2006 debut novel “The Futurist” followed a marketing specialist who didn’t care whether he was helping to sell sneakers or porn.
Othmer is back with a second novel — “Holy Water” (Doubleday) — that takes off from the global disorientation represented by outsourcing.
When we meet our nebbishy antihero Henry Tuhoe he is laboring in some vaguely defined testing/marketing division of a corporation based in New York.
Henry has been “transferred from Oral Care to Non-headache-related Pain Relief. Three years ago they transferred him from Pain Relief to Laxatives. Two years ago he was fast-tracked to Silicon-based Sprays and Coatings and was making quite a name for himself, but when lawsuits not of his making led to the rightsizing of the division (because discontinuing it would send the wrong signal to class-action lawyers), they transferred him to Armpits.”
Henry spends his days observing focus groups in which various sweat-reducing products are tested.
Meanwhile, his company is being hacked into little pieces and as many jobs as possible are being shipped overseas. The skeleton crew he is a part of wonders how small the office can get before it simply vanishes.
The 32-year-old man also wonders how he settled into such a dull “personal” life — at home in the suburbs, he ritualistically gets together with male neighbors he doesn’t particularly like, and he is anxious under the pressure from his wife to get a vasectomy due to her fear of another failed pregnancy.
Henry is living the same sort of well-heeled alienation suffered by the protagonist of “Revolutionary Road” but without the unquestioned job security Richard Yates’ corporate drone had 50 years ago. Perhaps the sickest joke in “Holy Water” is that young Americans no longer have soulless corporations that they can “sell out” to after they get tired of bohemian drift — those mind-numbing jobs are already being done in India for a fraction of the cost it took to feed and house Yates’s frustrated poet.
“Holy Water” puts Henry through the wringer that is usually faced by 
characters in hard-edged contemporary satires, but Othmer somehow manages to find human warmth in his hilarious hate letter to the way we live now.
Henry gets to have an adventure. He is sent to a fictional country — Galado — in the general vicinity of India to set up a customer service phone center for a Vermont bottled water company run by two environmental activist lesbians (cut from the same cloth as Ben & Jerry — i.e. capitalists with heart).
The country is about to explode in revolution — the Galadans are starting to feel like those Chinese workers who have been making noises about labor organizing — and Henry sees how the American way doesn’t necessarily work on the other side of the globe with the slave wage masses.
I don’t want to give away any more of Othmer’s wonderful plot, but Henry manages to open up and becomes human in a way that few characters in satire ever do. It’s a terrific book.
