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Microcosm of Our Society
Destiny and Other Follies follows a midlife consultant and his wife, a couple struggling through marital strain, waning career ambitions, and trying to find one another again. Where did the idea for this novel come from?
From life. I worked in consulting for far too many years and saw what it can do to a person, the cold dog-eat-dog brutality of it, the strain it puts on a marriage. It’s arguably the most extreme corporate experience one can have, and that compelled me to capture it on paper.
The consulting world in the novel feels both realistic and quietly surreal. What drew you to that setting?
Working as a consultant, experiencing so many different client environments, it became clear how the corporate world has impacted society, how disconnected and dehumanized it’s become. My intention was to present this world as a microcosm of our society, to depict the blurring boundaries between worklife and life.
Why was it important that the novel not remain entirely within Calder’s point of view?
It would have read more like a memoir if there had not been other points of view. It was important to show that his wife had similar experiences in her role as a retail banker. I also liked the idea of presenting their separate views about their marriage instead of only his own. Their different perspectives on the US were also important. They consider it from very different backgrounds and mindsets. Hana deserved to be a significant subplot.
What kind of reader do you imagine connecting most deeply with this book?
Readers who have direct experience with the corporate world seem the most likely. But anyone who is intrigued by the corporatization of our society would also connect with it, by the influence some of its most undesirable traits have had on us, and by what that might mean for the future.
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How will he tell his wife?
Younger and Bosnian, Hana feels adrift in an overwhelming America. Their relationship’s sole center of gravity is an old Weimaraner named Darwin. Terrified by her husband’s failing health and the prospect of widowhood, Hana takes a retail bank job and an interest in her one friend’s husband.
Meanwhile, Calder’s client work unravels; hints at internal sabotage mount. As the base ruthlessness of colleagues begins to emerge, so do the primal forces that drive him. His battle to salvage both dignity and career deteriorates into a thirst for vengeance, leading to unexpected revelations about his past, his world, and himself.
Destiny and Other Follies is a darkly comic, gritty yet humane portrait of misdirected lives in our corporatized age.
Destiny and Other Follies
Gregory Venters’s Destiny and Other Follies is a work of literary fiction, with a strong philosophical streak, about Calder Brandt, a midlife consultant whose career ambition is colliding with the long aftershocks of throat cancer, and about his wife Hana, whose loneliness, memory, and restlessness give the novel its second pulse. Set against corporate maneuvering, marriage strain, and the eerie approach of the pandemic, the book follows two people who are still living side by side but are no longer fully meeting each other where it counts. That setup sounds cold on paper. In practice, it is much more intimate and bruising than that.
Venters can describe a medical exam, a business meeting, a taxi ride, or a quiet argument at breakfast with the same level of pressure and attention, and that gives the novel a strange, impressive consistency. Nothing is treated as small if it matters to the characters. I liked that. At times, I also felt the prose leaning so hard into description and analogy that it risked slowing the story’s momentum, but even then, I could feel the intent behind it. This is a novel deeply interested in how thought works, how humiliation lingers, how a body can become part prison and part warning. Calder’s damaged voice and failing neck are not just plot details. They become part of the book’s whole emotional weather.
I also liked that the novel does not make corporate life easy to mock from a distance. It would have been simple to turn the consulting world into a flat target, but Venters gives it texture and menace and, oddly enough, a kind of tragic absurdity. The office politics, branding language, partner rituals, and petty betrayals feel painfully lived in, while Hana’s sections widen the book and keep it from becoming only Calder’s private storm. Her perspective mattered to me a lot. It adds memory, migration, grief, and a sharper social awareness, and it keeps reminding us that ambition is never a solo event because somebody else is always paying for it too. By the time the novel reaches its pandemic-shadowed final stretch, with isolation becoming literal as well as emotional, it feels less like a book about career disappointment and more like a book about the stories people build just to keep moving.
In the end, I found Destiny and Other Follies serious, searching, and quietly affecting. It asks for patience, and it is not the kind of literary fiction that hurries to charm you, but I think that resistance is part of its character. I would recommend it most to readers who like reflective, psychologically detailed novels, especially literary fiction that cares as much about inner erosion as outward plot, and to anyone interested in books about marriage, illness, work, and the humiliations of modern professional life. Readers willing to sit with discomfort, irony, and long emotional echoes will find a lot here.
Pages: 362 | ASIN : B0GNP6BGFK
