I finally sat down this weekend to finish “The Assistants” by Camille Perry, a novel that has been languishing in my Kindle for
months now. It turned out to be a disappointing experience. It started off well,
deploying my favorite plot device, “The Irreversible Bad Decision,” within the
first few pages. But by the end, I found myself disgusted and fed up with all
of the characters, and perhaps unfairly, with the author.
“The Assistants” centers around the harried Tina
Fontana, a personal assistant to famous media mogul Robert Barlow. Tina lives
paycheck to paycheck in a run-down Manhattan apartment, and spends her days
fretting about money and intuiting Robert’s every need. She’s a highly competent
assistant, and Robert, although he's a bit clueless in the way that the out-this-stratosphere
wealthy can be, treats Tina with a fatherly benevolence. All in all, they
seem to have a fond and respectful working relationship. However, Tina is also preoccupied
with what she sees as an unfair wealth disparity between her and her
one-percenter boss, and in a moment of weakness, she embezzles a large enough
sum of money from his company to pay off her massive student loan debt. This sets
off the predictable “hilarious” chain reaction that most Irreversible Bad
Decisions do, and before long, the other personal assistants at the company
want in on the action. This launches Tina into a criminal enterprise in fraud
that she has a hard time outrunning, even when she tries to transform it into a
legitimate business.
There’s nothing I love more than a good dose of
moral ambiguity in fiction. I enjoy reading about prideful, wicked, frustrating
characters who make bad choices, screw up, and take a long time to learn their
lesson. I don’t necessarily even need a redemption narrative. But I found Tina’s
behavior and mindset throughout the entire novel to be appalling. She comes across
as entitled, weak, self-righteous and materialistic, yet somehow as the reader,
I was supposed to be convinced that she was on some heroic journey of personal
growth and feminist self-actualization. What Tina was actually doing was refusing
to take responsibility for her actions, and dragging a lot of people who shared
her entitled mindset down a criminal path.
But what upset me more than her crimes was her
sense of victimhood. She constantly compares Robert’s lavish expenditures to
her own tightly budgeted existence, sniffing about how what he spends on a
weekend in the Hampton’s is three month’s salary for her, or obsessing over his
pricey wine and meals. This sense of injustice is a thread woven throughout the
entire book, and Tina uses the “it’s a huge company and they won’t even miss
the money” excuse as a justification for her actions. Yet until she starts
trying to launch a business with her ill-found gains, she never once makes any
attempt to move up the career ladder, beef up her skills, ask for a raise, or do
anything at all to improve her lot in life. Despite being well-educated and
experienced, she is moored in the mindset that she and her fellow assistants (every single one of whom is female), are hopelessly trapped in
their roles and completely lacking in personal agency. There was nothing at all
stopping Tina from asking her boss for a raise or an introduction to someone
who could help her move up, or from networking, or from exploring other options.
But the conceit the author seems to want her readers to swallow is that The Big
Evil Corporation is running a sweatshop full of oppressed, put-upon, underpaid
female assistants who are drowning in debt and have no viable options. I don’t
know about the rest of them, but Tina was smart and resourceful. She didn’t
have to be a victim.
When Tina eventually turns completely to the
dark side and blackmails Robert, it’s portrayed as some grand moment of
feminist empowerment. To me, it just seemed desperate, sad and irresponsible. I
had no sense of rah-rah you-go-girl whoopiness about it, and in fact, I felt a
little bit of shame for her.
It’s entirely possible that I just don’t
understand or can’t relate because the book’s intended audience is too far out
of my age demographic. Or maybe I’m extrapolating way too much from it. But my
patience for such narratives has worn thin, and I’m crabby about the fact that
my precious personal time was spent reading a book that just left me irritated.
I wish I had better things to say about it, but I feel like I was proselytized to for 300 pages about the
ravages of student debt, and that’s not a fun time for me. I struggled paycheck
to paycheck until my mid-thirties, but I still managed to pay off my student
loans the legal way.
Alrighty. Let’s get out of here on a cheerier
note. Since we’re on college and debt and age gaps, here’s a little funny from
College Humor:
--Kristen McHenry
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