Brent Wade: corporate culture clash - author of 'Company Man' - Interview

Brent Wade's first novel, Company Man (Algonquin Books, $18.95), takes readers on a journey into the power-lunching, back-stabbing, pinstriped world of white corporate America. The novel is a psychological study of a corp Black man who has all the accoutrements of success: the pretty, socially correct wife, the expensive foreign car and the home with the right address. But when there's Black skin beneath a white collar, nothing is simple. In a workplace dispute, the Buppie protagonist, Billy Covington, is forced to choose between the white bosses who pay his handsome salary and the protesting Black coworkers, whose methods and goals he questions.

"Corporations ask anyone who works for them to conform," says Wade, 32. "What happens to Black people is that sometimes the corporate culture is more comfortable for whites than for us."

Office life, to some, may seem a curious topic for a novel, let alone one by a Black author, but Wade finds it a natural choice. "Like most Americans, we spend most of our time at work, but there haven't been any recent novels that deal with the workplace. We have a more varied experience than what is presented." And although this book lacks, say, Toni Morrison's lyricism or Ishmael Reed's wicked wit, its socioeconomic focus makes it unique.

Says Wade, "I felt that the way most Black people live is not in some abject-poverty pathological situation. We do what everybody else does - we're out there trying to make a living every day.

Although first-time novelist Wade says his book isn't autobiographical, much of the book mirrors his life. Wade lives in Maryland, as does Billy Covington. Wade worked for Westinghouse Electric Corp.; Billy Covington works for an unnamed electronics corporation. Unlike Billy Covington, however, Wade, is a family man, not a company man.

"My focus is my family," says Wade, whose wife of 13 years, Yvette, recently gave birth to the couple's second child. "I'm probably the most boring Negro in America, man. I spend time with my kids. I go fishing with my brothers and my cousins. That's what keeps me anchored."

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