Friday Book Review: Ex-Hallmark writer weaves humor with TMI

​Graduating from college means leaving behind an unstructured, self-centered existence to jam yourself into the rigid American workforce. At best, we handle the transition with grace, poise and a little excitement. We take our licks but come out smarter, better-adjusted people. At worse, we handle it like David Dickerson, author of House of Cards: Love, Faith and Other Social Expressions (Riverhead Books, 369 pages, $24.95), who worked as a card writer at Hallmark for a few years during the late '90s.

In Dickerson's sociopathic yet readable memoir, self-perceived exceptionalism and a jones for jacking off at work come up against the culture at one of Kansas City's most famous corporate benefactors. That means a good helping of Ben Stiller-movie-ready cringe moments, but with one crucial difference. Dickerson isn't a good-intentioned character stumbling into awkward situations, someone to pity a little and laugh with.

Instead, his book is loaded with un-cute baggage of an unexamined life, which he sculpts into awkward moments. Then he places his family, friends and co-workers into the frame and yells, "Action!"

When Dickerson is hired by Hallmark, he goes out and buys a closet full of identical outfits so he'll never have to think about what to wear. He rejects the cubicle he's assigned in favor of long, chatty walks around the office, then acts surprised when his bosses want to transfer him.

Some of his descriptions of the world of Hallmark are wittily observant: "I hadn't thought about it before, but writing involves a lot of staring into space very quietly," he writes. He also does a fine job of describing his frustrations: "Do this enough and you'll actually feel like you're trapped in a mental hedge maze that someone is making you solve, even if you hate it."

At work, the self-described "wunderkid" annotates the process of how greeting cards -- random ones like an Easter greeting for a niece -- are commissioned, written, rejected, rewritten and on and on. But the most conspicuous feature of Dickerson's book is the writer's smarter-than-thou attitude, something not helped by his complete lack of empathy.

Dickerson treats his long-distance finacee with as much human warmth as a robot that's been taught to masturbate. He gets her to condone his cheating, then quickly hires a prostitute so he can fondle her breasts. (Your favorite "Kansas City arts weekly" makes an appearance here as that transaction's facilitator.)

The more he tests the limits of his relationship, the more he claims to love his repressed, religious finacee, but it's also clear he resents her unconditionally. As he gets more and more distant, so does his prose, which retreats to ugly, vengeful lines such as "And sure enough, at bedtime we cuddled and she blew me."

Still, there are puzzling narrative omissions. After a few months in the gig, Dickerson goes from a devout, Bible-reading virgin to a relived atheist -- a journey he undertakes here in just one or two hardworking sentences. Scenes that should provide emotional tension end up as pompous turns into pedantry -- "over-sharing," as Dickerson calls it.

By the end, it's clear that Dickerson's clueless arrogance precludes him from giving Hallmark what it needs. But before he takes refuge in academia, where he believes he'll be safe and understood, he takes a parting shot at Hallmark and it's hometown: "If nothing else, I hoped I would at least wind up in a smarter goddamn city."

House of Cards should have been an interesting look at how religious faith and creativity clash inside a hardened corporate culture, and it might have worked out that way for Dickerson himself. His book doesn't so much raise workplace or social issues as it constantly forces the reader to wonder how an unintuitive emotional invalid was ever hired to write cards that are supposed to express universal emotions.