Inhuman Resources

September 17, 2018
Alain Delambre, the 57-year-old antihero of this intriguing but overly long thriller from Lemaitre (Three Days and a Life), works a menial job sorting cardboard boxes of medications. When his supervisor kicks Alain in the behind because he’s too slow in his duties, Alain breaks his supervisor’s nose. The fight unleashes a capacity for violence that Alain didn’t know he had. After he’s fired, Alain, who used to be a human resources executive at a Paris firm before being laid off during a downsizing, accepts an invitation from a major company to an interview that requires him to participate in a mock hostage situation. This exercise involves members of Alain’s family, and he soon gets carried away, humiliating his wife, Nicole, and his grown daughters, Lucie and Mathilde, and punching his son-in-law, Gregory. Things just go downhill from there for the arrogant and self-centered Alain, and the violence gets worse. Many readers will empathize with Alain’s rage over workplace discrimination against older employees, but the overstretched plot builds to an unlikely conclusion that will satisfy few. Lemaitre has done better.

October 1, 2018
Stuck in crummy jobs four years after having been laid off as an HR manager at a costume jewelry store, Alain Delambre will do anything to improve his lot--including shamelessly exploiting his wife and grown daughters.Thoughts of his dire job situation "put me in the mood for terrorism," says the increasingly unhinged 57-year-old Parisian, who bids adieu to his latest menial gig by head-butting his boss. His hopes are lifted when BLC, a global consulting firm to which he has applied for the position of HR assistant, names him a candidate. Delambre is so desperate that he's willing to take part in BLC's "role play exercise," in which Arab actors playing armed commandos seize top executives of the oil company Exxyal, a BLC client, for the purpose of assessing their behavior under "violent and sustained stress." Everything that could go wrong does, especially after Delambre, who learns he is only a token candidate for the HR job, starts shooting off a Beretta he's bought for the occasion. In prison, portraying himself as a victim of the systemic mistreatment of unemployed seniors, he writes a splashy newspaper article that leads to a book deal. The book's title, I Just Wanted a Job, perfectly captures Lemaitre's ability to find hilarity in the most despicable of characters.Lemaitre (Three Days and a Life, 2017, etc.) takes his sardonic skills to new heights with this dark, loopy thriller, which portrays the modern workplace as the last place a displaced soul would ever want to be.

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October 15, 2018
The HR consultant for a monster French corporation has a nutso idea: fake a hostage situation and let job applicants, who aren't in on the fakery, attempt negotiations. The one who frees the hostages gets the job. Alain Delambre, 57, downsized four years ago and at his wit's end, is one of the applicants who lands an interview for the job. Not knowing what's coming, he's ecstatic and spends the first fourth of the book (too long) planning his presentation. But things pick up with a roar as the premise unfolds, and Delambre adds his own deceit to the corporation's. This is a fine literary thriller told in a wry, educated style with sly references to everybody from Hawthorne to Mailer. The author also brings the special gloom of French existentialism to his narrative. Take the guy who lives in his car and has no hope. If you want to kill a man, he advises, give him "what he seeks the most." A high-quality experience for readers with a taste for real pessimism.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)