The Ax

The conceit: a middle manager is laid off from his job, and is increasingly desperate to get another. He hits upon the idea of simply murdering competition for one good position. On the one hand The Ax is a clever crime novel. Westlake builds tension expertly, making each incident plausible yet filled with ways to go wrong... which means he also leads you into cheering on our homicidal hero. Burke is also plausible in his crime spree, an innocent man who turns to crime with a certain ironclad logic. On the other, The Ax is a political novel about the modern economy. This isn't me interpreting it. The book is very explicit - at least from our narrator's point of view - that things have changed from mid-century to the 1990s, that society has shifted from a sense of connected labor to an atomized, competitive arena. Burke learns through the course of the story that he cannot trust formerly trustworthy entities: not the police, nor the courts, not coworkers, certainly not employers. He ends up as a master criminal, nearly paranoid, deeply canny, ready to do anything to succeed. “Even Upton “Ralph” Fallon was not my enemy, I knew that. The enemy is the corporate bosses. The enemy is the stockholders. These are all publicly held corporations, and it is the stockholders’ drive for return on investment that pushes every one of them. Not the product, not the expertise, certainly not the reputation of the company. The stockholders care about nothing but return on investment, and that leads to their supporting executives who are formed in their image, men (and women, too, lately) who run companies they care nothing about, lead work forces whose human reality never enters their minds, make decisions not on the basis of what’s good for the company or the staff or the product or (hah!) the customer, or even the greater good of the society, but only on the basis of stockholders’ return on investment.” The Ax is, in short, one of the best works of popular fiction about neoliberalism.