Inhuman Resources (2019)
Pierre Lemaitre (1967)
Translated from the French by Sam Gordon
392 pages
Beware HR!
In the last several years, articles in various media outlets have cautioned employees to not forget that the first and primary concern of their colleagues in Human Resources is the good of the company, not the employee. For that reason, these reports point out, it is generally a mistake to assume that a conversation with someone in HR, even someone an employee knows well, is confidential. These recent reminders have identified the success of the “me too” movement as having given employees the dangerous notion that they can, for example, take their concerns about harassment to HR and expect to have them acknowledged and addressed to their satisfaction, only to be surprise to be dealt with as themselves a threat to the company, and potentially even let go or forced out.
Not surprisingly, the most capable HR personnel develop a deep understanding of human psychology and a broad set of techniques to enable them to navigate this delicate role, finding ways to defuse employee issues in a way that leaves the company unscathed. And, as writer Pierre Lemaitre makes evident in his novel Inhuman Resources, these same tools can make a skilled HR person with sufficient motivation a formidable opponent in the cat-and-mouse world of a noir thriller.
Lemaitre’s story opens with a man is his mid-fifties, Alaine Delambre, describing his morning at the latest unfulfilling part-time job he has picked up: sorting packages of medicines into boxes. Having lost his full-time job as an HR manager to a younger colleague four years earlier when his company was bought out by another firm, his frustration at being unemployed and his inability to find a suitable new HR position and so provide the comfortable lifestyle he and his wife had become accustomed to have left him at a slow boil. When his mercurial boss at the packaging operation first berates him as lazy and then gives him a kick in the butt, Delambre – though he contends that he’s “never been a violent man” (11) – pauses only a moment before head-butting the manager to the ground.
Even as he reels from being fired from that job and threatened with a lawsuit, he receives a callback from an interview for a potential position as HR manager for a large firm. The next step in the hiring process comes with a twist however: he must participate in a hostage-taking exercise being set-up for the dual purpose of evaluating the HR candidates, and selecting from among several existing managers at the firm to find the one most capable to execute the upcoming shut-down of a major facility for the company, expected to be a difficult and volatile event requiring a confident and unshakable leader.
Though recognizing the request as a highly dubious, if not outright unethical, hiring strategy, and despite his wife’s categorical demand that he retract his name, Delambre’s desperation leads him to sell out completely on getting the job. What begins as a cover-up with his wife – not telling her what’s happened with his part-time job and not admitting to her that he’s going to participate in the hostage-taking role play despite her objections – escalates into ever more audacious measures to maximize his chances of getting the job. He quickly reaches a kind of ends-justify-the-means mentality, placing all his chips on winning the job, and ultimately needing to get it just to cover the many and varied liens he takes out – both monetarily and in his relationships – to improve his chances.
Then, when on the eve of the day set for the hostage taking scenario, Delambre learns a disheartening truth behind the hiring process, he finds his hopes and plans utterly shattered. To what lengths will he go in response?
Setting the story in the time immediately after the Great Recession of 2008, Lemaitre incorporates into the story a liberal sprinkling of newspaper and TV news headlines regarding the economic difficulties of that period and the ongoing job losses that resulted. These references to the broader economic and social situation play like a sound-track in the background of events, adding weight to Delambre’s desperation, underscoring his frustration at the loss of the dreams he had had for his life together with his wife.
As Delambre becomes consumed by his schemes, Lemaitre brilliantly ratchets up the tension over three sections of chapters, labelled simply “Before,” “During,” and “After.” In the period before the hostage-taking role play we are inside Delambre’s head, listening to him slowly but steadily build himself into a frenzy as he prepares to ‘win’ the job, at whatever cost. Delambre's realization that he is sliding into a morass from which he may not be able to recover is captured perfectly when, meeting his daughter outside the school where she teaches to trick her into unwittingly helping him, he notes that
All around us the schoolchildren are yelling, jostling, taking the piss out of each other, drunk with the joys of being alive and fancying each other. For them, life is nothing but one huge prospect. (104)
Then, in an extremely effective move, Lemaitre shifts the perspective and narration to a different character during the hostage taking scenario, leaving readers to witness Delambre’s actions without knowing his thoughts; we become a kind of participant in events, experiencing the consequences of Delambre’s plans without being privy to his goals, or even knowing if he has any. As the role play of the hostage situation evolves – and not surprisingly goes off the rails – we watch the tightly wound Delambre seemingly unravel before our eyes.
When finally the story moves to the period after the hostage taking scenario has played out, Lemaitre returns the narration back to Delabmre, and the pace of the story becomes frenetic. We watch him bring to bear his career-long training in HR techniques of manipulating situations and people in an effort to not only succeed in his plans but now to simply stay one step ahead of his persistent and unyielding adversaries. As he tailors his tactics to the personalities and predilections of both his antagonists and his allies, and then adapts them as he encounters roadblocks, it becomes like watching a juggler who keeps adding more balls to the mix, until dropping one appears to become inevitable.
Though Inhuman Resources builds to the heart-stopping pace and moments of brutal violence that have characterized earlier Lemaitre novels such as Alex (my review here), at its heart it tells a radically different story, from a distinctive viewpoint. Central to Alex, for example, was the detective in the story who was, whatever his failings and foibles, clearly on the right side of the situation. In Inhuman Resources on the other hand, the police play only a bit role, and readers have a compromised, civilian protagonist in Delambre, one who straddles the line between hero and antihero.
Certainly we want to root for Delambre to win back some of the dignity taken from him by a heartless economic system focused on minimizing costs, one that has spit him out of the workforce for becoming a bit too old, and that seems to conspire at every turn against his efforts to find decent work. Through the depiction of Delambre and his plight, Lemaitre has embodied the ever more frequently appearing arguments by philosophers and economists identifying the damaging consequences of critical and potentially fatal structural flaws inherent to the capitalist system, such as its focus on working time as the measure of value of a human life, and on profit above all else, as described for example by Hägglund (my review here). Playing particularly to the fears of middle class Western readers, Delambre becomes a kind of current day everyman, caught in a system rigged against him, and just fighting for his life.
But the lengths to which Delambre is willing to go as he becomes ever more deeply entwined in his increasingly complex and risky schemes, and the relationships he is willing to jeopardize along the way, make it challenging to continue supporting him. We are forced to ask ourselves – even as we try to imagine our own desperation in such a situation – at what point do the ends no longer justify the means?
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