The Force.

• Author: Segal, David

My own sales career began and ended in London a few years ago, when I was making cold calls on the phone for a storm window manufacturer. My job was to dial numbers from a photo-copied page of the London phone directory and deliver a scripted earful when someone had the bad luck to answer the phone; a commission was mine if a person agreed to let a salesman come by for a home demonstration. This sounded like easy shillings to me. Sitting down in a room full of phone reps that first night, I could smell the money.

I lasted four days. Most folks would rather I mailed them a bag of rats than force them to entertain a couple of salesmen with windows. And then there were all these weird rules. If you sent a salesman to the home of an Indian family--the sub-continental variety, that is--not only did you lose your commission for that lead, but you were docked a percent of your next one. The company president swore this wasn't racism but a cold business calculation. Indians, he told us, never buy, they just haggle ad nauseum. This stereotype, obviously an international one, surfaces in Glengarry Glen Ross, which David

Mamet confected out of his year-long stint in a Chicago sales office. In the play, Shelly Levene knows he's despised by his supervisor when the only lead he gets is named "Patel," a name as Indian as Shapiro is Jewish. "Patel?" says a sympathetic colleague. "They gave you Patel?"

Odder still, we phone reps were told to use the name of someone famous. The theory was that if you started your spiel with, for instance, "Hello, this is John Gielgud" there might be several nanoseconds of confusion, sufficient time to get into your pitch and pique the listener's interest. Naturally, this didn't work. People were doubly annoyed; mad that it wasn't John Gielgud the actor, madder still that it was John Gielgud the salesman. The only fun of this was that a room of us sounded like a convention of psychotic celebrity wanna-bes, an endless cross-talking cacophony of "Hello, this is Diana Ross," "Hello, this is Denis Thatcher," and so on.

Unfortunately for the company, my performance was only a little worse than average. Job turnover was so high that the most senior phone rep had been there a grand total of three weeks, and the management used to pump our hands and say "Please come back" as we left each night.

But my sales career gave me an appreciation for just how ego-bruising this line of work can be. And, by spending some time around the salesmen who made home calls for the company, I learned this surprising fact: Salesmen are humans. These guys--they were all men--were neither foul-mouthed connivers nor pathetic buffoons. Their work was difficult, but they were friendly, not particularly cynical about their jobs, and seemed to make a reasonable living.

Salesmen like these are hard to find in literature or plays, which is why David Dorsey's The Force is such an original contribution. The book follows a Xerox sales team in Cleveland through one year as it struggles to meet its company-mandated quota of selling $30 million worth of photocopying equipment. Most of the team is likeable and, measured against our preconceptions, unlikely. You expect hard-bitten types in bad suits; what you get are yuppies with unshattered personal lives and solidly middle class incomes. What they do is not brain surgery, but there is enough skill to the job that they can be said to do it well. They are not saints, but they're not criminals either. This will surprise the many of us who presume that most salesmen are either rotten people selling good stuff or good people selling rotten stuff. And it will surprise intellectuals for whom salesmen have long served as a respectable target of scorn.

Where do our prejudices about this profession come from? In part, from weasly salesmen, the kind who radiate an arch-cheeriness that lasts as long as your interest in their wares. (And not just for big ticket items. In this country, the only attractive women who will approach a man and say "Hi, how are you?" are the sales ladies at The Gap.) But to the extent that our preconceptions are wide of the mark, the problem is this: The profession has been hopelessly mythologized. In the popular American imagination there are two archetypal salesmen, both wildly inaccurate, each one laughably at odds with the other.

The first is Theater Salesman, so named because he comes to us via playwrights like Arthur Miller (Death of a Salesman), David Mamet (Glengarry Glen Ross), and Tennessee Williams (The Last of My Solid Gold Watches). Theater Salesman isn't making enough money, his family life is a shambles, he is either a ninny or a con artist, and he is usually overwhelmed by his circumstances. In most cases, Theater Salesman is one part a fully realized human being and one part polemical jab at capitalism. In Death of a Salesman, for instance, Willy Loman stands for the middle class company man who gets ground up by his own expectations and the...