A Sour Book Review: “The Assistants”

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

Cover Art Rabbit Hole, Someone Wrote a Story and the Internet Lost its Mind

Here’s why I need to stop reading advice on the internet: I’m looking into one final option for novel publication before going solo with self-publishing. Said option requires nominal “book cover art”, so I spent a good portion of yesterday scouring the internet for public domain images that might fit the bill. I found myself rapidly careening down a rabbit of hole of ever-more bizarre non-sequitur image searches, until by the end I was frantically typing in strings of words such as “art woman rain blues sad ink umbrella.” You see, according to the wisdom of the internet, one’s book cover image must be simple, yet emotionally impactful. It must be colorful, but not too colorful. It must reflect the narrative thrust of your story, but be visually uncluttered. It must immediately draw the reader in, but not distract. And have no doubt that your book will fail spectacularly if your cover art is not up to snuff in every way. The end result is that I am sick of looking at images of sad women in the rain with umbrellas, and I still don’t have any cover art.

I wasn’t going to wade in on this, but against my better judgment, here I go: The New Yorker recently published a perfectly decent short story about two emotionally inept, communication-challenged people who went on an awkward date, and the internet proceeded to completely lose its mind. I kept seeing headlines about the story, and I finally felt compelled to go and read it myself. I really don’t understand the uproar, the gist of which seems to revolve around a lot of buzzwords like “emotional labor” and “intimate justice.” My experience of reading the story seems to be vastly different from the majority—unlike most of the women who are weighing in on it, I did not relate at all to the main character, and in my estimation, the story is fairly unremarkable. My main thoughts were, “Oh, how sad. They don’t know how to talk to each other,” and “Cripes, this chick is an emotional limp noodle.” That’s about it. I wouldn’t have thought twice about it had the internet’s collective head not exploded over it.

What I did find interesting is that the story seems to be scientifically designed to invite massive amounts of personal projection. The main character is a classic Mary Sue, the sexual situation the two get into is just ambiguous enough to be interpreted as non-consensual, and the male character seems to have caused universal discomfort simply by being mildly oafish. I find it fascinating that such an ordinary, even somewhat dull story could spark a million think pieces in under a week. My take? The female character was not a victim, the male character was not an ogre, both of them were equally incompetent, and if there really is such a thing as "emotional labor," women can avoid that burden by not bloody performing it. The last time I checked, we still had a little something called personal agency, a fact that seems to have been forgotten of late.

On the writing front, I’ve given up on the sonnets entirely after deleting the one I’d been working on in a fit of a rage. I think what I need to do for a while is draw or paint or color. Sometimes that helps loosen things up a bit on the writing front—to shut down the “thinky” parts and get some blood flow going to the more intuitive, unconscious parts of my brain. I have art supplies squirreled away all over the apartment for just such occasions, and I plan to drag them out and dust them off. A little coloring feels like just the ticket in these drab, dark Northwest days.

--Kristen McHenry

Mall Death Throes, Book Review: “The Arrangement”, Blogging in Sick

I finally had to cry uncle this weekend and replace my mangy, stretched-out, eight-year old bras, which necessitated a dreaded trip the local mall, since it’s been a while and I needed a proper fitting. I have been complaining for years on this site about the dismal state of retail, and I honestly thought that it couldn’t go much further downhill. Well, it has. Malls are perishing all over the U.S., and this particular one appears to be in its death throes. It’s so bad that they actually stopped bothering to air condition it. The whole place was muggy and smelly, and the store I went to buy my bras at was woefully understaffed. The fitting lady was attentive enough, but then I decided to go and look for lightweight pants for an upcoming trip. I walked into six stores, and not in a single one of them did any of the employees bother looking up from their phones. They didn’t greet me, ask what I was looking for, offer to help in any way, or even make eye contact when I was able to tear their attention away from their screens and ask for a fitting room. They’re not even pretending to care anymore. It was eerie. Call me old-fashioned, but when I walk into store actively wanting to spend money, I expect some minimal level of engagement on the part of the staff. I guess that’s now too much to ask, as are clean dressing rooms and an orderly display of goods. I don’t know which came first: Did the lack of service lead more people to turn to online shopping? Or did the lack of customers lead to wide-spread employee ennui? I know not the answer, I only know that malls are now an absolute last resort for my sartorial needs.  

I recently decided to take a break from my Minecraft escapism and plunge into fiction escapism instead. “The Arrangement” by Sarah Dunn had been lounging in my Kindle “recommended” queue for a while, but I eschewed it because it had a cheesy cover and looked like a tedious domestic drama. Well, it is a domestic drama, but it turns out it’s far from tedious. It’s actually a great read: witty, funny, suspenseful, heartfelt, and with just the right satirical touch. Middle-aged couple Lucy and Owen are struggling with raising an autistic son, a stale, sexless marriage, and the stresses of shaky finances and career slumps. At a drunken dinner party one night, mutual friends confess that they have decided to try an “open marriage” arrangement in order to shake up their similarly stale marriage. After talking around it for a while, Owen and Lucy decide to embark on a six-month experiment in which they are both free to pursue sex with other people. They come up with an exhaustive list of guidelines and boundaries, including a strict “no tell” policy, confident that the rules will protect them from any emotional fallout.

The predictable disaster ensues: Owen immediately takes up with a sexual wildcat with mental health problems and stalking tendencies, and Lucy reluctantly agrees to sex with a friend of a friend, then quickly falls in love with him. All of this happens against a backdrop of a small town where secrets are not easily hidden. Although the situation that Lucy and Owen are in is emotionally wrenching, the story is told with a great deal of wit and humor, and the minor characters (Sunny Bang being my favorite, with the autistic Wyatt a close second), are a delight. Although Lucy and Owen are frustrating at times, there was never a minute that I didn’t care about them and wasn’t pulling for them to make it. I read the entire book in almost one sitting because I couldn’t stand not knowing what would happen to them. If you need a gripping novel to take you away for a while, I highly recommend “The Arrangement”. I give it four bedsheets!

Reading has turned out to be a good activity for me, as I am feeling like ten kinds of crap this weekend. I don’t know if it’s the infamous poor air quality—Seattle has been trapped in a haze of wildfire smoke for the last week courtesy of BC--or if it’s this stubborn pinched nerve in my neck that is causing an endless pain/spasm/pain cycle, but I do not like it one bit and frankly just feel like crawling back into bed. Perhaps that is what I will do. I leave you with the latest Simon’s Cat video so I don’t have to bother with a proper close to this post:

--Kristen McHenry

Book Review-ish: Confessions of a Domestic Failure

I started reading a new novel this weekend called “Confessions of a Domestic Failure” by Bunmi Laditan. It’s amusing and fast-paced, however, I find myself contending with a small but growing distraction in the narrative.  I’m usually pretty good at suspending disbelief and throwing myself headlong into works of fiction, even if I have to mentally gloss over a few plot holes or inconsistencies here and there. But this particular bugaboo is starting to annoy me to the point of frustration. The heroine of the novel, Ashley Keller, once had some sort of high-flying corporate job before she found herself laid off, then soon after pregnant. She’s now a struggling (to put it lightly) stay-at-home mom who is “comically” scattered and disorganized. Laundry hilariously piles up, potato sprouts rage out of control in the pantry, and she seems to have some sort of chronic personal hygiene issue. It’s all very Bridget Jones, but I’m about thirty percent into the book, and I can’t help but be a bit flummoxed by this woman’s total lack of executive function. I’m going to say something now that will probably make moms everywhere want to descend on me with pitchforks, but…seriously. This character has one—one, eight-month-old daughter. She seems to have abundant financial resources and no job or obligations outside the home. Yet she is absurdly overwhelmed and has zero ability to hold things together in even the most rudimentary way.

Now, if she was a ditzy scatterbrain prior to having a baby, this is would be a little more believable. But it’s hard to fathom that a former corporate executive wouldn’t at least have some inkling of how to transfer time management skills to the home front. I’ve never had a baby, so what do I know? Maybe some permanent hormonal shift suddenly makes you lose years of learned skills or decimates your ability to prioritize, but I find it a little bit hard to swallow that the minute this woman is removed from the office suite and plopped into a living room with a child, she reverts to inane levels of incompetency. I ( I mean me, come on,) find myself mentally yelling at her to get her sh*t together. I know she has a child, but for Cripes Sake. Does a baby really it make that hard to pop a load of clothes in the dryer or wash a dish occasionally? Even eight-month-olds sleep now and then, don’t they?

For you moms out there who want my head, in my defense, I grew up in large-ish family and took care of lots of little siblings, so I know it’s not easy. I understand that even one baby is a major and exhausting endeavor. But if I met this character in real life, I would wonder if her incompetency was perhaps a passive-aggressive ploy to cope with her resentment of being taken out of the workforce. I’d like to add that I became neither a great mother or a high-flying corporate careerist, so I’m not one to judge…except as a reader of an otherwise entertaining book that is blemished by this one deux ex machina of unrealistic ineptitude.

However, the book is brilliant at skewering the cult and culture of perfectionism around motherhood. The author really shines when taking on the over-the-top, corporate-driven push to prey on the anxieties and insecurities of middle and upper-middle class mothers who are brainwashed into believing that parenting is an extreme sport, and any minor lapse in judgement will cause their child to end up on the stripper pole with heroin needle jutting from their arm. Now that I’ve aired my frustration with the book’s narrative, I think I can probably finish it and appreciate its gifts rather than being distracted by its flaws.

Otherwise, I don’t have much else to say except that I am secretly loving the ultra-cool and rainy June we’ve been having here in the Pacific Northwest. I figure that true to tradition, things will turn on a dime after July 4^th and we’ll have to contend with the same hot, sticky climate that the rest of the of the country does, but for now, I don’t mind the gray skies and cool drizzle one bit.

-Kristen McHenry

Dan Brown Plot-o-Matic, Breezy Dress Update, Lingering Lit Mag Idea

I’m not sure why Dan Brown has loomed so large on my blog of late, but so it goes. I got a little flack on Facebook last week for admitting to reading his novels, which has left me feeling a bit defensive on his behalf. I personally don’t care what anyone thinks of my literary taste, but Dan Brown does not get enough credit for the hypnotically predictable genius of his plots. And to prove it, I have created The Dan Brown Plot-o-Matic! (Feel free to use it to write your very own Dan Brown novel).

A Terrible Murder takes place in:

The Pentagon

The Louvre

The Vatican

The Sydney Opera House

Subsequently, Robert Langdon is interrupted from a:

Deep Sleep

Tropical Vacation

Lecture on Symbology

Shiatsu Massage

by a frantic phone call from the head of:

The CIA

The NSA

The FBI

Misc. made-up alphabet agency (create your own!)

He is immediately rushed by helicopter to the nearest airport, where he is hustled onto a private plane headed to:

The Vatican

Istanbul

Washington DC

Antarctica

Upon landing on the tarmac, he is introduced to a slim, sexy, stunningly beautiful:

Physicist

Archeologist

Paleoanthropologist

Art Historian

Immediately after meeting, they are attacked by:

Drones

Foreign Agents Working for the Deep State

Masked Cultists

The Psychopath Villain’s Henchmen

They flee on foot, cleverly eluding their attackers and eventually solving the mystery of:

The Stolen Rembrandt

The Ancient Cypher

The Murdered Pope

The Deadly Pathogen

I’m telling you, he’s brilliant. The beatific interchangeability of his novels is incredibly soothing to me. Now kindly leave me to enjoy them in peace.

I’m still on a mission to find a Breezy Dress for this upcoming work event. Today I scoured my neighborhood’s numerous consignment shops, on the prowl for the Garment of Perfection, which of course I did not find because it does not exist. I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m just not a breezy-dress kind of girl. If I wear anything other than pants, it’s usually a Victorian-length velvet skirt with knee-high boots and an oversized shawl/blouse combo. Beachwear and resort dresses are just not in my DNA. I so want to be the casual, sand-in-her-hair, tousled blonde I keep seeing in all of the dress ads that have now colonized my web browser, but I think it’s time to face the cold, hard facts: I would look ridiculous in a Breezy Dress. I’m a pale, sun-allergic red-head, and whatever fantasies I harbor about transforming into a tanned island-hopper are never going to come to fruition.

Another fantasy I’ve been harboring for a while is the idea of starting my own online literary magazine. But I’ve been too unfocused in terms of theme, type, etc. I have a lot of ideas and it’s been hard to settle on one. But the afore-mentioned Dan Brown-related Facebook exchange has inspired me, and a little seedling of an idea took hold and won’t let go. It would be a huge undertaking and require a lot of planning, but I think I may be ready to make it a reality sooner than later. More to come…in the meantime, in honor of my island-hopping dreams, enjoy this silly video from College Humor:

--Kristen McHenry