A masterpiece One of the few genuinely comic novels since Lucky Jim. Elaine Dundy Ever since college, George Wren has dreamed of working at The Outsider, the prestigious weekly edited by his hero, the suave English expat Gilbert Twining. So when George sees a listing for a junior editor, he trades in his job at Cbs for half the salary and a ringside seat in the unexpectedly cutthroat arena of a small-circulation, highbrow little magazine. To George surprise and dismay, The Outsider is seething with malcontents and mutineers, at least according to Twining, who keeps cornering George for after-work martinis, pouring out his anxieties, professional and otherwise, while George wife, Matilda, and baby son wait for him back in Queens. Is Twining paranoid Is he insane Or are George new office-mates truly plotting an insurrection And if so, what all of it got to do with George An indelible satire of 1960s intellectual New York, Office Politics is also a celebration of that endangered species, the office, at its pettiest and most idealistic, as the proving ground where so much of grownup life takes place.