Inc. is a tale of the American Dream comically unraveled. With a lovely wife, two handsome sons, a shiny SUV, a killer golf game, and a mostly brick home in a mostly affluent suburb Gary Cooper Grabowski is living his dream. Even his job—Director of Human Resources for the city’s largest hospital—rewards him at the corporate level for demonstrating the same talent for window dressing he’s long cultivated in his personal life. Affable, agreeable, and conflict averse, people see in Gary whatever they wish to see, which is, as his wife ROSE ruefully ponders, “exactly as Gary wishes to be seen.” So Gary simply rolls along, buoyed by his own refined brand of Midwestern savoir fare, and ignoring the pesky inconvenient truths that cause many of us to reflect upon the deeper, often messier details of life. But the devil is always in the details.
Never mind that Gary’s wife departs every Monday night dressed to the nines for her “book club,” a thinly veiled smokescreen for an affair she’s been carrying on with her dentist; or that some questionable downloads on the family computer have caused considerable consternation regarding the sexual orientation of his younger son Brad; and that his elder son James has abandoned a lucrative Wall Street career to start up an Internet magazine called Pop Slutte. All these things elude Gary, who is single-mindedly preparing for an upcoming Policies and Procedures meeting with an employee manual that informs his entire moral compass—and yet, ironically, is about to throw Gary completely off course.
In fact, the only thing that appears to rattle Gary is his father, Woodrow. A cantankerous old cattleman who worked the stockyards of East St. Louis, Woodrow is stubborn enough to have remained in the same house he built fifty years earlier and foolish enough to believe that organizing a block party might be just the thing to bring his now blighted and dangerous neighborhood together again. But after Woodrow’s attempt at grass-roots urban renewal leaves the old man busted up and bloodied outside of a crack house, Gary is forced to bring his octogenarian father out of the city and into the suburbs. Specifically to Walden Lake, the planned community in which Gary resides and Woodrow despises—a community of wide-open lawns, three-car garages, faultless symmetry, and yet, a community somehow incapable of keeping filled the very lake for which it was named.
It’s not long after his father’s unwelcome arrival that Gary’s carefully constructed pastiche of a life begins to show its feeble stitching, and a comical series of unplanned events threatens to undo him: an accidental rendezvous with his secretary, a recurring bout of erectile dysfunction, a homeowners’ association coup d’état, and an acute case of angina that leaves his personal life hemorrhaging into his professional life. Yet Gary remains oblivious until the final moment.
Through the eyes and actions of the Grabowski family, Inc. explores what it means to move from a country that makes things to one that simply consumes things, and whether these two Americas (and these two men) are as far apart as we might believe. And so begins the central question with which the book continually wrestles: What does it mean to live an authentic life? Will this family—and will Gary, the story's basically good but willfully misled protagonist—figure it out before it's too late? The revelation at the end of the novel may surprise the reader as much as it does Gary.