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

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

Trashy Memoirs and Other Petty Amusements

I’m currently reading the deliciously trashy memoir “How to Murder Your Life” by Cat Marnell, which is the literary equivalent of a bowl of potato chips. I’m not saying this because I am in any way a book snob, (I read Dan Brown, for Christ’s Sake,) but it’s not normally the kind of book that would interest me. I don’t like memoirs, and I’m not enamored of poor-little-rich-party-girl narratives. But damn, this one really hooked me--mainly because I’m shocked that Cat Marnell is still standing. She’s 5’2” and has ingested enough speed, heroine and booze in her short lifetime to kill someone the size of Andre the Giant ten times over. I also find it compelling because I’m appalled at the number of people in her life who have been involved in her enabling—her kind, well-meaning bosses at Conde Naste, but also a parade of sycophants, deadbeat boyfriends, users and hangers-on who saw a wealthy hot chick with a serious problem and decided it was okay to take advantage. Not to mention her cold, clueless parents who passively funded her lifestyle but didn’t seem to care much about her emotional well-being. It’s sad and disgusting, and Cat is an extremely frustrating narrator, but still I read on, like the gluttonous trash-glutton I am. As obnoxious as Cat is at times in the book, I do think she is genuinely talented, and I hope that she can keep it together and move forward with her life and her career. She’s as much victim as perpetrator, and she deserves some real help and support.

I went down an interesting Pandora rabbit-hole last week after setting up a new Pretty Reckless station as a break from my normal, tinkly, airy-fairy New Age fair. And I heard the most amazing thing: a cover of “The Sound of Silence” by Disturbed. It was so stunning I listened to it five times in a row. It actually gave me chills. It occurred to me that this is what that song was meant to sound like. Nothing against the reedy, ethereal sound of the original, but when you compare the two, you’ll realize that the first version is major weak sauce. “The Sound of Silence” is a serious, brutal, heavy song that needs some major gravitas in its execution, and Disturbed’s version nails it. I think that even Simon and Garfunkel would agree.

Well, I am just chock-full of petty amusements this week. The other thing I’ve been distracting myself with is the absolutely charming side-scroller “Trine 2,” which popped up in my Steam queue on sale for three dollars. Three dollars!! So of course I had to buy it. I like it because unlike many games, there are multiple ways to solve puzzles. You can flip between an object-levitating wizard, a nimble ninja, and a rotund warrior. Between the three, the game allows endless creativity in the way you move through the world and solve problems. The lack of rigidity really appeals to me. I love that it allows me to solve logic problems using creativity and wit, rather than, well, logic, which isn’t really my strong suit. Also, the graphics are stunning, and in one sequence, you get to feed peaches to a giant animated frog. What’s not to love?

Here’s the real version of “The Sound of Silence.” It starts off innocently enough but really picks up steam in midway through:

--Kristen McHenry

An Unbook Review, The Thula Mystery, Affirmation Fairy

I take an Epsom salt bath one or two times a week to maintain my sanity, and while I do, I always read what I call a “bathtub book”—cheap, easy-to-read fiction, usually pulp murder mysteries or chick lit. But I recently ran out of bathtub books, and the only book on my shelf I hadn’t read yet was “The Boys in the Boat”, which I got in a Christmas book exchange last December. It’s about the University of Washington men’s rowing crew trying to win gold at the 1936 Olympics.  I never cracked it open because I’m not interested in the subject matter and I dread reading “acclaimed” books. But I’d been assured by everyone who’s read it that it’s amazing, fascinating, transcendent, etc. so in the absence of anything else to read, I figured I’d give it a try.

I will concede that it’s well-written and the author, Daniel James Brown, does an excellent job weaving a very complex story, albeit one that 50 pages in, I still haven’t mustered much interest for. But the part of the story that did grab me has nothing to do with the rowing team. It’s about the pivotal subject Joe Rantz’s stepmother Thula, a beautiful, talented and cultured violinist who had dreams of performing in concert halls all over the world, and who apparently had the chops to make that dream a reality. For reasons that remain completely unclear to me, she married Joe’s father, moved with him to a run-down mining cabin in Boulder City, and promptly bore three children. Of course, she’s miserable, lonely, and furious. But my question is…why?? Why on earth would this woman who had talent, education, and brains, think it was a great idea to marry a miner and move to a hardscrabble town in the middle of nowhere, where she couldn’t practice the violin because her fingers were constantly chapped from the cold? What was the plan there, Thula? It remains a distracting puzzle to me. I understand it was a different time and there were different expectations, but I’m still disturbed by it. I don’t think the book is going to circle back and tell me whatever became of Thula, either. The story has just moved on, leaving me worried about her, even though she wasn’t a very nice person, and she kicked her own stepson out of the house when he was barely a teenager. (Bonus fun fact: She was apparently psychic and predicted the sinking of the Titantic.)

I’m also disturbed by the fact that compelling writing and historical relevance is not making me more interested in finishing the book. You can’t force yourself to be interested in something you’re not, but a part of me feels like bad, shallow person, because so many people loved this book and it’s so critically acclaimed. And that’s why I don’t like reading acclaimed books. I don’t usually love them as much as other people do, and then I end up with an inferiority complex. I should be interested. It’s an important story and rowing is a metaphor for life and the subjects of the book triumph over adversity through teamwork and so on into infinity and me probably never picking this book up again.

I submitted a short piece of fiction to a literary magazine recently. Since I’ve been focusing almost entirely on getting my novel done, I haven’t submitted any work for a long time, and I’ve forgotten about the small but addictive thrill of waiting for a response; living with the possibility of an acceptance at any moment now; that someone may like my work enough to publish it, meaning my worth as a human being is affirmed. This is a pretty inefficient system for maintaining self-esteem. I think there should be random affirmations of everyone’s worth. I’m not sure how this would work. Maybe a  sparkly-clad affirmation fairy could appear out of nowhere occasionally and hand out a card and a treat. “Hello! I’m the affirmation fairy and I’m here to tell you are a worthy human being! Enjoy your cookie!” Or, maybe we could work on loving ourselves and not looking to outside sources to make us feel whole. But that’s really hard work and there’s no cookie involved, so I think the fairy idea is better.

For those of you who do liking rowing, here’s a video. It looks like a total nightmare to me, but to each their own!

--Kristen McHenry

Space App, The Witches of Worm, Worry Ward

Recently, I came across an app that lets me know how many people are in space. It seemed like an absolute necessity, so I downloaded it, and now at any given time I can tell you….how many people are in space. Currently, it’s six, and most of them have Russian-sounding names. Six seems like a low number to me considering the vastness of the cosmos and how many people there are on the planet, but then I suppose sending humans into space is a costly and complicated endeavor. It’s a strangely comforting app. It shows photos of Earth from a great distance and pictures of the astronauts floating around in the vastness of the universe. I find myself using it for perspective. Whenever I start to get anxious, I open it, and it reminds me that we exist in an infinite galaxy and that maybe the exact hue of the napkins at the annual banquet I plan isn’t really that important in the overall scheme of things.

During my writing group last week, I was trying to remember the name of my favorite author when I was a pre-teen. I was talking about one of her early books, “The Witches of Worm”, which I took a brief stab at trying to turn into a screenplay in college. I finally remembered that the author was Zilpha Keatley Snyder. Upon a Google search, I found a list of her books, and I was reminded with an almost mystical nostalgia of her book “The Changeling”. I can’t believe I ever forgot about it. I was fascinated with that book as a young adolescent. It ignited my imagination in a way that nothing else I read did, and to this day, it still has an influence on my writing style. It was just one of those books that imprinted on me very early, and even though I consciously forgot about it, it’s still rattling around in the deep recesses of my soul, leeching out all over my poetry and stories. The book’s main character Ivy Carson is my spirit animal. Sadly, Zilpha Keatley Snyder died last October due to complications from a stroke. But I’ll always be grateful for her literary legacy. If you’re interested, you can read a synopsis of “The Changeling” here.

I wasn’t really joking about the hue of the napkins. Last Thursday was the Big Annual Stressy Event I Plan Every Year for work, with a bazillion moving parts and all kinds of things that I worry will go wrong/fall apart at the last minute/epically fail. I spend the weeks leading up to it obsessively checking and double-checking lists, nagging vendors, going over things in my head, etc. I have a superstitious but unshakeable belief that my worrying acts as a ward against disaster. It proves to the banquet gods that I’m paying attention, and therefore I will be rewarded with a smooth and glitch-free event. Ironically, all of the things I worried the most about and planned contingencies for were complete non-issues, and things that it never even occurred to me to be concerned about went awry. There comes a point where your brain just can’t process any more possibilities and walls itself off to focus only on the essentials. It was a lesson in rolling with it, but in the end, it all went off brilliantly, and I came home exhausted but deeply satisfied.

Here’s a brief interview with Zilpha. It reminded me of some other long-forgotten books of hers that I’m now determined to re-read, including “The Velvet Room” and “The Egypt Game.”

--Kristen McHenry