Easy and Hard Ways Out: A Novel

By: Robert Grossbach

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Synopsis: An underachieving engineer building a fighter plane faces a life-changing decision in this Vietnam-era novel perfect for fans of Kurt Vonnegut, Joshua Ferris, and Joseph Heller. This furious, slapstick tale has been praised by the New York Times as one of the &“best and brightest&” novels about the Vietnam War. We follow the travails of Harvey Brank and his fellow employees, all undrafted malcontents working in a spectacularly small-minded, almost Kafkaesque engineering company. Assigned to build a fighter plane and drawn into office intrigues, Brank faces impossible demands. His wife, despairing of his patchy employment history and restlessness, hopes against hope that Brank won&’t get himself fired this time. But what do you do when everything conspires against your vision of a decent, peaceable life?Easy and Hard Ways Out is a blunt, freewheeling look at the men who stay home during wartime—a story about the everyday, with a timeless moral at its heart.