In Good Company

Up until yesterday, fifty-one-year-old Dan Foreman’s world was intact: there was his loving wife, his two well-turned-out daughters, his perfect house in the suburbs and his well-paid job as advertising manager of the renowned “Sports America” magazine in New York. Today, however, things couldn’t be more different, and the otherwise fresh-faced and youthful-looking Dan suddenly looks a good deal older. First of all his wife surprises him with the news that she has unexpectedly fallen pregnant, then his older daughter, Alex, announces her desire to attend the more expensive college after all, confident that Daddy will manage to wangle it because he’s raking it in.
The question is, how much longer. Dan’s magazine has unexpectedly been sold off to a company called Globecom and many employees suddenly find themselves out of work. Dan is demoted and they put a twenty-six-year-old Harvard upstart named Carter Duryea over him. This slick careerist introduces a number of salutary methods as prescribed in friendly New Age jargon in the sect-like company’s house bible. These include: conferences on the family Sunday, friendly basketball matches with one’s dear colleagues, and jolly motivation training on an empty stomach. The most irritating thing about Carter is his new-economy-speak, for which Dan might even forgive him, if it weren’t for the fact that his new boss doesn’t know a thing about selling advertising space and is clinging on to Dan like a limpet.
Carter even has the audacity to invite himself over to the Foremans for dinner, where he blithely sits down in between the two daughters of the house. Dan’s crisis has already reached boiling point, but when Carter starts having an affair with his daughter, Alex, Dan senses that he is about to explode…