The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Men Can’t Be Saved: A Novel by Ben Purkert

Episode Date: August 8, 2023

The Men Can't Be Saved: A Novel by Ben Purkert https://amzn.to/47l2ekq A knockout debut novel that tackles a haunting question: What do our jobs do to our souls? Seth is a junior copywriter whose latest tagline just went viral. He’s the agency’s hottest new star, or at least he wants his coworker crush to think so. But while he’s busy drooling over his future corner office, the walls crumble around him. When his job lets him go, he can’t let go of his job. Unfortunately, one former colleague can’t let him go either: Robert “Moon” McCloone, a skeezy on-the-rise exec better suited to a frat house than a boardroom. Seth tries to forget Moon and rediscover his spiritual self; he studies Kabbalah with an Orthodox rabbi by day while popping illegal prescription pills by night. But with each misstep, Seth strays farther from salvation—though he might get there, if he could only get out of his own way. In his debut novel, Purkert incisively peels back the layers of the male ego, revealing what’s rotten and what might be redeemed. Brimming with wit, irreverence, and soul-searching, The Men Can’t Be Saved is a startlingly original examination of work, sex, addiction, religion, branding, and ourselves.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times, because you're about to go on a monster education rollercoaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com. Welcome to the big show. My family and friends, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls,

everyone in the giant circus tent of the sky that we have for the 14-year, 1,500 episodes are going on. I think we hit the annual review, I think the end of September or August. Welcome to the big show, my family and friends. We certainly appreciate you guys coming by. We're going to talk to a brilliant novelist about his amazing new book that is hot off the shelves it's so hot i had to use those special nuclear gloves when they sent it to me because it's just that hot you know the shiny ones with the they look kind of aluminum anyway people are like we don't do nuclear chris we just

listen to a podcast what the fuck are you going on about uh so anyway guys we're gonna be talking about this amazing new book that just came out august 1st in the meantime as always we have to guilt and shame you to refer the show to your family friends and relatives uh and you know if you haven't either i mean why why not why are you holding out on us man why you got to be like that go to goodreads.com for just christmas youtube.com for just christmas linkedin.com for just christmas holy crap that linkedin newsletter grows like a weed every time i go over there i'm like why do people keep subscribing this thing damn it it's like up to like six or seven thousand now or something i can't even keep up with it uh so uh

for sure your family friends relatives go to good reason or go to itunes give us a five-star review over there as well he is the author of the amazing new book came out august 1st like i said it's so damn hot i'm still waiting for it to cool. It might take 10,000 years the way this book is hot. It's called The Men Can't Be Saved, a novel. And he joins us on the show to talk to us about his latest book. Ben Perkert is on the show with us today. And he's going to be talking to us about his latest book as well.

I'm just having a Monday here, I guess. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, Poetry, Plowshares, Kenyon Review, Tin House, and elsewhere. His poetry collection, For the Love of Endings, was named one of Adroit's Best Poetry Books of the Year. He holds degrees from Harvard and NYU. we'll ask him about his mba no i'm just kidding uh and where he was a new york times fellow he is the editor of backdraft a guernica do i have that pronounced right ben guernica guernica i'm having a monday man what can i do uh interview series focused on revision and creative processes uh he teaches creative writing at ruckers and uh all that good stuff welcome to the show ben how are you chris how

are you i am doing good other than you know just trying to pronounce everything correctly you know they give me two days off on the weekend uh they let me free you my little podcast cage here and uh i come back and i'm like what do do I do with this thing? Again, after 14 years, you think I know better. So give us your dot com so people can find you on the interwebs, please. Ben Perker, B-E-N-P as in Peter, U-R-K-E-R-T. And I'm on Twitter. There you go. So what motivated you to write this book? So my first job out of college, I was working as a copywriter, tagline copywriter at a branding agency. And the first week I started the show Mad Men debut. Did you watch that show?

A little bit. A little bit. Okay. Well, I loved it. Partially, I loved it because it was a way of translating the work that we did at the agency to folks who didn't know anything about that world, right? If you're not in branding and advertising, you don't really know what it's all about. And Mad Men was a lens into it, but it was the wrong decade. The show was taking place in the 1960s. I thought it'd be interesting to write a novel about what that world looks like today. So it's set in a New York City agency, and it's loosely based on my own experience there do they still call it madison avenue in the big four or am i just really old from the 90s and 80s well matt i mean mad men is the you know is

from madison avenue um but now the the agencies have largely scattered i mean they're all over the city yeah it's gone now so you entitled the book uh the men can't Saved. So why did you choose that title? Well, you know, for folks who haven't had a chance to read it yet, you'll see that it comes into play in a lot of different ways in the book. My main character, one of his clients, he's not really happy about getting assigned to this nonprofit prostate cancer research organization. He'd much rather have like a Coca-Cola branding account or an American airlines, like a big sexy brand.

He gets staffed on the prostate cancer nonprofit brand that no one else wants to work on. I need to come up with a jingle for that one. Well, that that's sort of his job, you know, is to come up with, with a slogan or a tagline.

But in talking to the folks at the Prostate Cancer Research Organization, they start talking about survival rates with cancer, and they explain that not all men can be saved and why. So there's a literal reason why the title comes into play. But the bigger factor with the title

is my main character makes a lot of bad decisions. And there are other men in the book who also make a lot of bad decisions. And there are other men in the book who also make a lot of bad decisions. Did you base this character on me? Yeah, it's Chris Voss. It's not even fiction. It's an account of your life.

Damn it, I told you not to tell people. Well, you know, you didn't. You can edit this, right? Yeah, we'll take that out. But yeah, so the question is, you you know similar to the show mad men you've got these male characters behaving badly can they be redeemed can they be salvaged is is one of the questions of the novel there you go and there's some spirituality uh woven in here

between uh the kabbalah and orthodox rabbis and different things. Is it like, is it set in New York or another place? Yeah. So, so there's not a big spoiler. It happens early on. My main character gets laid off. So this job that means everything to him,

he identifies himself as a, as a tagline copywriter gets taken away. And in effect, he has to rebrand himself because what is he going to do now with his life once he loses that job? So for him, the fact that he's Jewish, that's one of the things that he can't ever lose, right? It's not going to be taken away from him. So he goes on a spiritual journey related to that to find himself. Ah, maybe make less mistakes, maybe. I don't know. Can't give away the middle and ending, of course, of uh with novels but uh uh it's very interesting um is it does it maybe have a feel a little bit of a

american psycho some of the you know some of the tense scenes in the office there yeah yeah it's got i mean it's funny right you write you write the book um without comps in mind and then readers and editors will say oh oh, it reminds me of American Psycho or reminds me a little bit of Catcher in the Rye or Fleischman is in Trouble. But each book is its own thing or at least strives to be. There you go.

And yeah, Esquire called it a 21st century Catcher in the Rye. So there you go. And they even said the genius worship and toxic masculinity still dominating the advertising world today. I guess, does it still dominate? I guess I haven't gotten that memo.

So there's some comedy, I think, or some levity in the book, stuff like that. Yeah, yeah. I mean, listen, my character, on the one one hand is a tragic figure. He loses his job in large part because of hubris, right? He thinks he's the best copywriter on earth and he's certainly not. So it's sort of a tragic downfall, but he's also a comedic character too. So, I mean, I tend to love books, TV, movies that are dark comedies, like a show like Succession that is, you know, what is Succession? Is it a drama? Is it a comedy? It's a little bit of both. That tends to be what

appeals to me. So I think that, you know, folks are thinking about maybe reading the book. That's something to keep in mind. There you go. It, let's see, the New York Times reviewed it, said, I laugh more times than I can count. So that's a great review to write something that is interesting, engaging, and drives the reader, but also is funny and enlightening. And, you know, it's not totally dark. Do you think it would parallel a bit? I was talking with someone about Fight Club today. And Fight Club was kind of a great men's movie and great men's book.

If you read the book, the book's better than the movie. Something along those lines, maybe? Listen, it's very different than Fight Club, but when did Fight Club come out? Maybe in the 90s? 95, 3, something like that. I don't know if I've seen it.

I've watched it when it came out. I'm not sure if I've seen it since. Listen, there's a big fight scene. It's not giving too much away, but there's a big fight scene at the end of my book. And the whole novel's been building toward it. Oh, really? So, you know, I'm interested in the book, but also in life, the way in which men have relationships with each other. And oftentimes the only way for male relationships to be physical is to be violent. And, you know, for my character, I think in many ways, you know, he wishes for intimacy from some of the other male characters in the book. But the only way he knows is through a kind of physical violence.

So is it close to fight club not really but that was my attempt to sort of thread the needle for you i think what i was trying to imply was and i did it poorly was was that it was you know fight club was kind of a state on manhood in the current state of manhood and to correct myself it came out in 1993 and so there's a lot of commentary about manhood and i think uh correct me if i'm wrong i'm just going off the notes here but you know you you peel back the layers of the male ego evidently uh revealing what's rotten what can be redeemed uh and different things and it might be some different statements on you know where men are today maybe yeah yeah yeah absolutely there you

go there you go it's modern day i not going to put that moniker on. It's a mixture of all of it put together in a blend. And of course the best of, and of course your take on it as well. That makes it so great. What, what, how did you do the character development?

I mean, you've got some Judaism in there. What made you pick some of the characters in there and put some of the content in there yeah it's a good question i i didn't spend a lot of time mapping out the book before i started it what i wanted to begin with was a voice my background is not really in fiction it's in poetry so this is my first time writing a novel but but I did spend 10 years working on it. And I, you know, wasn't, there's a rabbi who's a main character towards the end of the book, but I didn't start the book thinking, Ooh, you know, I'm going to have this rabbi come in on the 20th chapter or something like that. I tried to just get the voice of my character, right. And then if you raise a

character, right, sort of like if you raise a kid kid right, they grow up and then they meet people and they develop their own relationships. So I wanted it to be organic in that way. I wanted the characters on some level to develop themselves. There you go. And so how long have you been writing poetry for? Tell us a little bit about your history and your background and your upbringing and what got you to a point of developing you know, developing a lot of different things that you've done and now you've got a novel. Yeah, sure.

So I had English teachers. I was lucky. I had great English teachers who made me want to be a writer, you know, told me that if I wanted to be a writer, what I had to do was read more. So just, you know, burying myself in books as much as I could. And I had a teacher who loved poetry, and the way that she loved poetry made me love poetry. So when I got to college, I knew that that's what I wanted to study. I studied

English, specifically focusing on poetry. And then senior year, the question was, what job was I going to get? Because it's not a lot of paid poet positions out there in the world. And I had a great professor who said, you know, why don't you try copywriting? Why don't you try writing taglines for an agency? It's sort of like poetry. It'll pay you better. And you can decide if you're going to be happy doing that or if you want to do something else. So that's how I ended up at the agency. There you go. And I mean, you develop great copywriting skills in the agency. You have to be creative. You know, of course,, nowadays everyone's just using chat TPT.

I mean, no, they're not. I wonder if they are. A lot of copywriters are, but my understanding is the big firms have banned it. I don't know. Or some big firms have banned it. They're like, no, we want... You know, because owning ideas and copyright and

different things. There are a lot of issues that come around that. But... You feel that... In what ways do you feel that your background in copywriting and poetry really kind of helped you develop the novel as you were writing it? As you're writing, you're sitting there going, oh man, this really helped me put this to paper or maybe frame certain situations and things like that or tell stories. I think it helped and it hurt being a poet. You are trained to be really laser focused on language at the,

at the level of the word, at the level of the syllable, you got to get the music, right? You got to get the imagery. So a lot of my favorite novels are written by former poets because they just, you, you oftentimes, not always, but you oftentimes feel that level of care with each sentence. On the other hand, I think it hurt me tremendously because it made me slow. I mean, it took me like a decade, right? I'm trying to chisel like a pretty big sculpture, but I've got like a pretty tiny screwdriver. You know, my toolbox is for smaller scale work usually. So I'd like to think it helped, but it also, it took a lot longer.

And also I should say as a poet, you know, you're not learning about things like plot or character. So all of that was stuff that I had to teach myself. There you go. And how to develop and stuff. We've had some great poets on the show. I know what, you know, one of the things you do is you're dealing with an economy of words where they have to be very short when you're writing poetry, I imagine.

And then when you're writing a book, it's kind of like long form. And you can, of course, have maybe some more freedom. But when you're used to probably having that concise communication and economy of trying to do it. Uh, I imagine that can be a challenge to make those gear switches, but I mean, 10 years of training, you know, there you are, here you are. 10 years of flailing and then you end up, you know, I was trying to frame it, you know, so it sounded good training, but, uh, uh, we'll go with your words, uh are the poet uh let's see uh

uh what uh anything in the future is there another book you've got cooking some of our novelists have always got something on the fires yeah yeah writing writing poems so hopefully i'll put out a poetry collection and then starting a new novel but at the very beginning it's at that stage yet where i don't i don't want to even talk about it because i don't know if i have anything but um you know i i gotta keep writing that's what i love to do so yeah writing's an amazing sport is sport the right word um i just threw that out there but i should probably think of it more as a sport but it's it's an amazing thing and yeah when you keep writing and you write every day and you focus on writing it makes all the difference i mean that was how i got my book written i was just i i i for 10 years

i was trying to get it written and then my friends and i over covid we we formed a little uh accountability group and we said we're gonna write a day and whoever doesn't i don't know gets their knuckles smashed or something uh and we didn't really have a thing but you know we just more physical violence you're more physical and semantic um i'm kind of alpha male-ish uh so uh you know we just peer pressure right so we uh so we did that and and just by doing that and building that muscle and calisthenics, if you will, made it so it just finally caught fire on me after a month or two. And I just started writing more and more. I was like, fuck this hour of bullshit. This thing's cooking.

And so I want to encourage people that are out there who want to write, who want to write books and stuff and do things like you do. Write every day. Read every day, stick with it. I try and consume 100 books a year. I think probably next year I'll probably go to more. It's such a great mind gymnasium. I'm clearly not a poet. Well, you're into sports. Ben's sitting here going, I could think of better words i would

never did you say mine gymnasium yeah yeah yeah yeah i see it i get to have potential as a poet everyone has potential to probably uh i flunk second grade ben that's the callback joke we use in the show uh so ben anything more you want to tease out on the novel before we go uh anything to tease out well i'll just say that um one of the things that's been fun sitting where i sit with this gigantic calendar behind me is that um you know i get to see reader reactions and i've gotten all right i mean the book just came out but already i'm starting to get notes and see comments and reviews where some people love to root for this character they find him very charming and endearing and others are really enjoying hating him and rooting against him really and to me that that almost feels like i've done my job right because i want i i sort of

was aiming to hit that sweet spot where you would be right on the fence i love that kind of a kendall roy from succession sort of character where you're unclear if you're rooting for or against so i don't know if that sounds appealing to your listeners but that's that was sort of the thought process that's what we hear a lot from novelists that their readers sometimes will either define or or fill in blanks, or sometimes it's like a song. They just kind of add whatever their take is. Like everyone knows Stairway to Heaven is a song about Jimi Hendrix getting killed by Nixon.

Everybody knows that, but some people don't. I'm just making shit up. I convinced someone of that one time. I convinced someone of that one uh my one of my secretaries and we built a fake web page that uh said that that was the true symbolism behind the story and she bought it so um it's an old story but yeah it's it's interesting how they'll define in fact i think i have one novelist on the show and she's like i didn't realize that my character was an alcoholic until all of my readers told me.

Yep. Yep. I was like, wow. Okay, well, there you go. So you're on that beautiful journey writing novels and opening up this world. And I think I just will look forward to you kicking ass some more and doing great things. Chris, I appreciate it. Get home safe. There you go.

Give us a.com so people can find you on the interweb, sir. Sure. Ben, and then my last name is Perkert. in peter u r k e r t dot com or you could follow ben perkert at twitter there you go uh order up the books folks wherever fine books are sold the men can't be saved a novel it's not about me but it probably could be because i can't be saved uh i've heard from the religious people and they said, no, we're not saving you. Or folks,

hot up the presses, be the first one to read it so that way you're ready for this next book that comes out in its next poetry. Thanks for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com, 4chesschristfoss, youtube.com, 4chesschristfoss, linkedin.com, 4chesschristfoss, and all the great places on the internet. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe

and we'll see you next time.