Do Not Delete

Every August, Arthur Kesselring opens The Wrack, a long grey house built in 1927 on Long Island’s north shore, to the young stars of his investment firm. This year he has invited forty people instead of twenty-two. Everybody on the lawn assumes he is announcing something.

Teo Vasquez-Lindt has made the drive four times and the trees still get him. He came from a state school and a scholarship, he buys one good thing a year and wears it into the ground, and he can hold an entire situation in his head at once, every party, every incentive, every consequence, without effort and without rest. Beside him in the car are Del, who once let a managing director talk himself out of a position over eleven seconds of silence, and Ily, who cannot be in a room without finding out who in it is having the worst time.

At fourteen minutes past two on the Sunday morning, Teo moves a cooler eleven feet. That is all he does, and he will say it to himself every day for the next two and a half years.

By January he is running Kesselring Loew, the youngest chief executive in its history, and he is extraordinary at the job, because nothing in a meeting can frighten a man who has already done the worst thing he will ever do. The trouble is that nobody closes Kess’s account. His calendar keeps sending invitations. His notetaker keeps summarising meetings. A ticket to deprovision him sits in a queue, pending approval, and the approver is Kess.

Sharp, funny and quietly devastating, Do Not Delete is a comedy noir about ambition, succession, and the love neither man would name.