The Finder by Colin Harrison
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Buildings & Boobs

Below the marble foyers and plush offices of mid-town Manhattan are of course the sewers: Two worlds. One world is visible, impressive, ornamental and confident; but that’s only a façade for what lies beneath. It is the hidden world of the sewers which is essential, not the marble foyers. If the visible weren’t properly maintained, there might be complaints. If the invisible stopped working, life itself becomes impossible.

As it is with buildings, so is it with people. Those above don’t think at all about those below. And this provides great opportunity. One man’s trash is another man’s inside information. Hence the real contradictions of modern high-tech capitalism: “CorpServe's clients were paying it extra money to more efficiently steal the very information they most wanted destroyed.”

It is women, of course, who inhabit and maintain the nether regions of buildings and the lower reaches of society. They are, as it were, the plumbing that connects upper and lower. Women have made advances in society but not where it counts in New York City, that place “Where blood gets turned into money!.” The reason? “The permanent government of New York City, the true and lasting power, is found in the quietly firm handshake between the banking and real estate industries.” Those handshakes are almost exclusively among men. This is a world of marginalised women, “A corporate world so close they could reach out and touch it with their cherry-colored fingernails. Yet given the stratifications of American society, it is a world they are unlikely ever to know from within.”

Women exist in that government for the two things which Harrison makes very clear: sex and the removal, medical examination and cleansing of excrement. But don’t believe him, just ask Trump (who gets a mention as the ‘great American trickster’ in this book of 2008 which aptly captures his two interests: buildings and boobs). Otherwise “they are faceless, nameless, and invisible.” They live in a parallel universe, something like Red Hook in Brooklyn, which has nothing to do with the high-tech paperless office but through which that office is connected to the moral excrement as well as to the money it creates. What goes around, comes around, as it were. When the plumbing starts backing up, everyone eventually notices. A blessing really. There may be some justice after all.

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