About the Book
Berthcut & Sons is a small Philadelphia retail/mail order business, purveyor of religious goods to a dwindling clientele of clergymen, seminarians, and migrant church ladies. The novel follows the rise to power of a phlegmatic apprentice salesman, Dexter, and the corresponding decline of his Type-A superior, Gerard. The careers of these men intersect with a number of significant developments: the hostile takeover of the business by a distant conglomerate, Cerulean Enterprises; Dexter's passive pursuit of a co-worker, Sylvia; and the ongoing mischief of three elusive antagonists: a Business Archangel, a salacious telephone voice, and Ben, the company's star salesman whom nobody's ever seen. The telephone voice pursues Gerard and causes his devotion to the business to waver (that is, he wastes company time on her). The Business Archangel ostensibly watches over the shop to prevent romances such as Gerard's from developing - and the archangel will step in himself to chase off the voice and get Gerard's mind back to business. Meanwhile, Dexter's convinced that Ben is the archangel, and that Gerard and the shop's manager, Doug Dugan, are either playing an elaborate trick on him or they have created Ben to cover up the loss of funds from Cerulean. The novel is divided into three parts. Part One, "The Trainee" follows a day at the office but over the span of Dexter's first five months. This section acquaints the reader with the religious goods business, the Berthcut mentality. Part Two, "The Salesman," runs from the fifth to tenth month of Dexter's employment, whence his responsibilities are intensified and, also, his "true vocation" dawns on him: the priesthood. At the same time, Gerard's business sense dulls and he becomes obsessed with getting together with the telephone Voice. Part Three, "The Manager," presents the company's gravest crisis, the future of the firm is in doubt.
About the Author: Robert Castle studied English and got a degree in the Writing Program at Penn State in the early seventies. After attending Columbia University School of the Arts for a brief time, he traveled around Europe and lived on and off in Florence, Italy. For fifteen years he lived off his earnings as a cook at a New Jersey seaside town before finally giving up and getting a full-time job as a teacher of History, Sociology, and Film. Bob has regularly published articles for Bright Lights Film Journal since 2002. Other of his film essays have appeared in Film Comment, The Film Journal, The Journal of Religion and Film, Talking Pictures, Cinetext, and Metaphilm. He has had other regular gigs at Unlikely Stories and at The Circle Magazine with a quarterly column called "Half-Baked Ideas." He has also written two essays about teaching History for Archipelago, has several articles about his travels in Europe at The Paumanok Review, and has literary pieces at elimae. His fiction can be found at many places online: Fiction Funhouse, Fiction Warehouse, Wilmington Blues, 3 AM, 5_trope, The Sidewalk's End, Octavo, Double Dare Press, Arbutus, Eclectica, Facets, Skive magazine, and InDigest. His pre-Internet publications included literary magazines like The Sun, Gadfly, Timber Creek Review, Curriculum Vitae, The MacGuffin, The Monocacy Valley Review, The Iconoclast, and A Summer's Reading. His first three book's include A Sardine on Vacation, a novel (Spuyten Duyvil), The End of Travel, a memoir (Ravenna Press), and Odd Pursuits, a collection of stories (Wild Child Publishing). All of these books were published in 2006. In the last year, new books by Bob have appeared on Kindle. First was Berthcut & Sons, his first novel, the story of the birth of a salesman (sorry, Willie Loman). Then he converted his short story collection, Odd Pursuits, into a digital format. Two other works of his fiction now available are a second collection of stories, Fits of Generosity, and a book of three novellas called The Lies Commonly Agreed Upon. He also has two nonfiction works: The Interpretive Odyssey of Stanley Kubrick and The Education Battleground.
