Ron Elgin needs no introduction to advertising executives in the Pacific Northwest. He is the co-founder of Elgin-Syferd, one of the leading advertising agencies of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. If anyone knows about writing what you know, it’s Ron.
Upon retirement, Ron wrote two collections of short stories based on his life experiences in the advertising world: Huckster and The Man Behind the Curtain. Now he’s turned to fiction, and in Hucksterville, in which one of the characters has read Huckster, Elgin shows that he can be just as much fun making up outlandish situations as he is retelling the real ones.
The novel begins when Max Foreskin, the CEO of Tight Fit Athletics, ends up causing his ad agency to quit because his employees can’t stand him anymore. Instead of hiring a new agency, Max decides to create his own in-house agency. You have no idea how to do that, but that doesn’t matter. It is a task for those who work under your command. Soon, a former lady turned employment agency owner is assembling a team of creatives for Max so he can take advertising for Tight Fit Athletics to a new level. Not that he cares about Tight Fit Athletics. She just wants the commission to put the team together, and as long as she finds some warm bodies, good or not, she’ll get what she wants.
Because Max Foreskin is completely unreasonable, he provides an extremely tight deadline for when his agency should be up and running, so out of desperation, creatives are recruited from groups of people equally desperate to work, including the homeless. . Fortunately, Megan, a homeless woman who is homeless, is also bright and experienced. The rest of the surprising – and surprisingly talented – team includes a man with Tourette syndrome, a transvestite, and several other wacky characters, two of whom are named Herman and insist on being called “The Herman.”
Somehow, this diverse group of characters put together an ad campaign that has all the potential to be a winner until Max decides he wants inappropriate sexist ads. Sex is the only thing Max thinks about most of the time, as evidenced by his string of sometimes devious relationships.
Team members in the new internal advertising department fear they will all be out of work if Max’s ads are allowed to run. But little can they foresee the strange chain of events that will forever transform the destiny of Tight Fit Athletics.
Humor runs rampant on every page of Hucksterville. If you thought Michael Scott of The Office was out of control, after reading this book, you will discover that he has led a sheltered life. So have some of the characters, but in different types of shelters. In any case, Hucksterville is not a book to be missed. It’s as funny as Vonnegut, but also with a subtle social satire at work that will make you realize that situations are not as absurd as they may appear on the surface. Elgin is rumored to be already working on a sequel.
