Book Review: Cash Out, by Greg Bardsley
All these people that you mention
Yes, I know them, they’re quite lame
I had to rearrange their faces
And give them all another name
— Desolation Row, Bob Dylan
Fear and Loathing in Silicon Valley
Greg Bardsley does for Silicon Valley what Hunter S. Thompson did for Las Vegas. His new novel, Cash Out, is a 400-page gonzo-journalism inspired riff on a bizarre world hidden behind the bland office parks and drab suburbs of the San Francisco Bay Area.
His alter-ego, Dan Jordan, is days away from seeing his $1 million stock options vest, yet the moment he leaves the medical office where’s he’s just had a vasectomy, things start unraveling. He’s kidnapped by a rabid band of redundant IT workers who blackmail him into betraying the trust of the executive he writes speeches for. From this point on, the clock is ticking and the game’s afoot.
Bardsley, I mean Jordan, is an emasculated postmodern hero married to a kick boxing beauty and best friends with a cage fighter. Caught in a maelstrom of comic book violence he lurches from one scrape to the next, searching for bags of frozen peas to numb his bruised gonads, surviving on pain killers and alcohol. He loves his family, despises his boss and is unnerved by a cartoon character cast of neighbors who indulge in sadistic rituals with lawn furniture behind the innocent facades of their suburban garage doors. Some truly strange stuff here. I’ll never be able to ride on the upper deck of a London bus again without the sour memory of Bardsley’s scatological imagination re-surfacing.
Silicon Valley Speechwriter
Greg and I have worked as speechwriters at some of the same Silicon Valley companies. But his novel describes a parallel universe that I could not possibly have imagined. Nor did I find anyone recognizable in this work of fiction. He really did rearrange faces and give them all other names.
But anyone who makes their living as a professional speechwriter will recognize his interactions with egotistical executives, scheming support staff and the faux-glamour life in the corporate jet fast lane. For me, the vasectomy and subsequent attacks on his mid-section symbolically represent all the suffering speechwriters endure: doing whatever it takes to put words of wisdom into the mouths of the real men who deliver the speeches; constantly threatened with crazy deadlines, undermined by outside consultants, sleep deprived and subservient.
Greg is a fantastic writer. The dialog crackles, the pace is relentless, the characters unforgettable. The lottery-like frenzy of Silicon Valley stock options must have given rise to countless tales of those who were able to cash out and those who missed the jackpot by a few months, weeks or days.
You don’t need to go to Las Vegas to gamble your life away. Cash Out tears the veneer off the Silicon Valley stock-option crapshoot. Kudos to Greg Bardsley for telling it like it is.
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