Want to find a job? Try this

Clark Finnical did what you're supposed to do as a self-publishing author: He looked up reviewers who had reviewed books similar to his book and asked for a review. I had reviewed a book similar to Job Hunting Secrets (from someone who's be there) . . . and many more tough questions answered! and, because I have hunted for a job and I have hired job hunters, I asked him to send me a copy.

Finnical says he has been in the job market five times, managed to find a job each time, and that experience gave him a basis for his book. He was downsized (found redundant, terminated, laid off, sacked) twice during the Great Recession. "At its core," he writes,"the principles behind landing a job, that is, how you win over the hiring manager, are relatively simple. The complexity lies in how you make that happen."

The principle, I believe, is to find an organization that has a problem your experience/knowledge/labor can solve and convince the decision-maker that you can do so. The challenges are: (1) identify the organization with a problem you can solve; (2) get in front of the decision-maker; and (3) convince him/her that you're the solution.

Finnical write that there are three implied questions a hiring manager asks to determine whether you are a viable candidate: Can you do the job? Will you like the job well enough to stay? Can we stand to work with you?

You can differentiate yourself from other candidates by answering one (or all) of these questions: Have you made money for your employers? Have you saved money for your employers? Have you increased the productivity of your employers? Have you made a positive difference at your employers?

From that it follows there are a bunch of things you should never say, like: "I'm not sure if I'm a good fit for this job, but . . ." or "I need  . . ." As Finnical says, "The interview is not a time to talk about your needs. It is your time to explain how you can address the hiring manager's needs."

When I was hiring, I put an ad in the newspaper and the resumes poured into the office. I took the stack and made three piles: the candidates, the possibles, the hopeless. These days, the process has been automated; big companies use an Applicant Tracking System that evaluates online applications. Reportedly, it does a good job of weeding out the hopeless candidates, not such a good job of identifying viable candidates. (Indeed, "a Vice-President of Human Resources decided to test his company's ATS system. He applied for a job at his own company and received an automated rejection letter from the ATS.")

Job Hunting Secrets offers suggestions on how to tailor your resume to improve the odds that it will make it through the ATS, but in a number of places Finnical points out that networking or having an introduction to the decision-maker is much more effective. Indeed, a solid contact within the company will get you past an ATS rejection. You still need a professional resume, but spraying an industry with 60 resumes is a waste of perfectly good bandwidth.

The book is filled with useful tips and information, plus references to other books and sources. Unfortunately, it is also written for someone like Finnical who has been downsized through no fault of his/her own and who can cite  to a background, can cite clear accomplishments, examples of making or saving money, increasing productivity, or making a positive different. It is less useful for someone who is seeking an entry-level position or who wants to move out of a dead-end job into one in which he/she can make a positive difference.

I also have a problem with the book's design. Because it is self-published, I believe Finnical did himself (and the book's sales) no favor by not hiring a graphic designer. The cover looks amateurish,  the pages cluttered, and there is an enormous amount of white space. I am afraid that someone simply leafing through the book will discount it because it doesn't appear to be a professional product. If the design is amateur, how good can the advice be?

Nevertheless, as I said, the book is filled with answers to a job hunter's questions. If you are looking for a job, looking for a better job, or know someone who's looking, check out Job Hunting Secrets.

"Idaho" feels as if written from the inside

A friend of mine told me that Emily Ruskovich's first novel, Idaho, was the best book she'd read in a year. Because my friend reads widely and is a writer herself, I took that as high praise and read the book

I'm not sure Idaho is the best book I've read in a year (I'm still recovering from Rachel Cusk's Transit), but it is powerful and deserves to be read widely by thoughtful readers. And while I don't usually do this—I don't look at other reviews before I write my own—in this case I'm making an exception because the first one-start review on Amazon today is a good place to start this commentary.

The woman writes: "Dark, depressing, hopeless, grim, jumps from person to person without character development, long passages that you get lost in, no closure on anything. Impossible for me to see anything redeeming about this book." Consider yourself warned.

She is correct; Idaho is not a happy book. One main character, Ann, is married to Wade who has terminal Alzheimer's and the disease causes him to do—allows him the freedom to do—abusive acts. 

Wade's first wife, Jenny, is serving a life sentence in prison for killing 12-year-old May, their younger daughter. The day of the murder, 16-year-olds June, their older daughter disappeared. 

So we have an inexplicable death . . .  a man who has lost two children and his wife and is now losing his memories . . .  a woman who does not understand her act on a sunny summer afternoon when the family was gathering firewood for the winter . . . Jenny's cellmate who is damaged in her own way . . . and Ann, twenty years younger than Wade, someone who was born in Idaho but who grew up in England, a singer and music teacher, someone who falls in love with Wade and tells him:

      "I could take care you you," she said softly. She was very surprised to hear herself say this, but even so her voice was caml, as if she had been intending to say it all along. Bur really it was the only time that such a thing had occurred to her and the words escaped her to quietly that she wondered at first if he had even heard. As she waited to find out, dozens of blackbirds, startled at nothing, rose off the telephone wire at once. Ann and Wade watched them converge and scatter like a handful of black sand thrown against the sky.
     After a long time he said, "It wouldn't be right."

The Amazon critic is also correct that the narrative moves from character to character, but few readers will have trouble knowing whose point of view we're following at the moment. I don't understand or agree with her complaint that there is no character development. By the end of novel everyone has changed, although, to be fair, not every question has been answered or loose end tied off (a compliment).

Some readers complain about that the chronology is confusing. Ruskovich numbers the chapters by the year in which the main action takes place (there are also flashbacks within chapters): 2004, 2008, 1985-1986, 1995, 2006, 1999, 1971, 1995, 2007, 1995, 2008-2009, 2009, 1973, 2010-2011, 2009, 2012, 2012-2024, 1995, 2024, May 2025, 1995, July 2025, 1995, August 2025. In other words, the novel's story stretches from 1973 to August 2025. It strikes me as gutsy to play with time the way Ruskovich does (I can imagine an editor complaining, "Why can't you just tell a straightforward story?") and a tour de force to advance the action into 2025.

This is Ruskovich's first novel; her short stories have appeared in literary magazines and she was a 2015 O. Henry Award winner. She grew up in the mountains of northern Idaho so when she writes about the landscape, the small towns, the brutal winters, and the black flies of summer she's writing from the inside. I have only one nit to pick: In the prisons in which I've taught, the prisoners call solitary "Going into the shoo"—the SHU, segregated housing unit—not Lock. But maybe "Lock" is the term they would use in the fictional Sage Hill Women's Correctional Center.

I would not say Idaho is the best book I've read all year. I will say it is one of the best books I've read all year. Sophisticated readers who want a rewarding and moving experience will enjoy it.

Ordinary people making their way in the world

A tradition in Japanese fiction is the "I-novel," sort of  a fctionalized autobiography or memoir. Hiromi Kawakami's The Nakano Thrift Shop reads like an I-novel. The narrator, Hitomi Suganuma tells her story of working in the shop, her attraction to a younger co-worker Takeo, the advice she receives from her boss's older sister Masayo, the idiosyncrasies of the boss/owner Mr. Nakano, and the stories of certain of the shop's customers.

Mr. Nakano is a wheeler-dealer. He buys used items—not antiques—and sells them from the shop in a western Tokyo suburb where there are a lot of students. A man in his early fifties, he's on his third wife. He has a college-student son by the first wife, an elementary-school daughter by the second, and a six-month-old son by the third. Plus he has a mistress. When he says he's going to the bank in the afternoon, he's as likely to be meeting his mistress at a love hotel.

Hitomi, who seems to have no parents, no siblings, no friends, is attracted to Takeo, who is Mr. Reticent. At one point Hitomi asks Masayo for advice. Masayo is a woman in her early 50s, single, with a regular lover.

     "How does one go about having a carefree conversation with a boy?" I decided to ask Masayo one afternoon when Takeo wasn't around. Masayo was in the process of going over the receipt book, but she looked up and thought about it for a moment.
     "If you can get them into bed, they tend to relax a bit."
     I see, I said in response.

Hitomi manages to invite Takeo to her apartment for pizza and beer. After they chatted about the shop, eaten the pizza, and drank the beer Takeo smoked a cigarette:

     I didn't know you smoked, I said. Every once in a while, he replied. Without saying much to say, we just sat facing each other. We esch drank another can of beer. Takeo looked at the clock twice. I looked three times.
     Well, then, Takeo said and stood up. At the front door, he brought his lips near my ear. I thought he was going to kiss me, but I was wrong. With his lips close, he said, "I, uh, I'm not one for sex and all. Sorry."
     While I was standing there astonished, Takeo closed the door behind him as he left. After a few moments I snapped out of it. Thinking about it while I washed the glasses and plates, it occurred to me that Takeo had chosen to eat the pieces with the least amount of anchovies on them. I couldn't decide whether I should be angry or sad about it, or just laugh.

These two citations give you a sense of Allison Markin Powell's translation (with I presume the original's use or lack of quotation marks) and the tenor of the text. The Nakano Thrift Shop is a novel in which nothing very dramatic happens. Rather, individual Japanese act and interact on one another. One has a sense that the author has not attempted to heighten the reality to engage the reader but to use the minutia of daily life to convey the reality of these individuals. It is a love story, but it's not a romance. It's the story of ordinary people trying to make their way in the world, and in this case the world is contemporary Tokyo and a shop filled with used goods.