"The Plot" by Jean Hanff Korelitz

I’ve written before about the downside of choosing many of my reads from lists of prestigious literary award-winners or high-brow book reviews. I end up reading a lot of important, thoughtful, and beautiful literature, but it’s often not fun. Not that great literature has to be boring or depressing, but there’s usually a heaviness in subject or prose that can make the reading feel a bit like work. And I like to work for my literature, but I’m realizing that I don’t like to work all the time. Korelitz’s The Plot is an engrossing mystery/thriller about the motivations, justifications, and perils of writers. Most readers (myself included) will probably see the plot twists early, but that didn’t stop me from enjoying the ride, even the stereotypical hackneyed ending. Despite some of the more overdone contrivances of the mystery genre, the book also raises plenty of issues of “ownership” in an age of over-sharing—when do we have the right to tell someone else’s story?

"Black Buck" by Mateo Askaripour

The jacket blurb says that Black Buck is for "fans of Sorry to Bother You and The Wolf of Wall Street," which is to say the novel is about the insanity of high-power sales and its intersection with race. The novel centers on Darren, who's working at Starbucks despite graduating valedictorian of his class and possessing potential for greater things. One day, on a whim, he convinces a regular customer to buy a different drink. The customer, Rhett, is so impressed with Darren's sales skills that he convinces Darren to come work for his company Sumwun. Darren is renamed "Buck" and racially hazed, but the adversity strengthens him and he eventually saves Sumwun through a disaster. I haven't seen more than 15 minutes of Wolf of Wall Street, but I think it follows somewhat from there: meteoric rise, lots of drugs and partying, bad decision-making, alienation of old friends and family. Then Darren decides the key to saving Black people (and other people of color) is teaching them sales.

I'm somewhat ambivalent about the novel. There's certainly some on-point racial satire, particularly around the way Buck's co-workers' surface-level geniality masks underlying prejudice. The book as a whole, though, feels so extreme that it's hard to get invested. Part of that extreme comes from the hyper-emphasis on sales as the end-all-be-all of life (the book is even framed as a "manual" for readers to learn sales). Part of the problem with Sumwun is its single-minded belief in the importance of its work. As if selling more subscriptions for teletherapy makes any actual difference in the world. Now, this is a problem in corporate business in general--the intensity of the work giving the illusion that the work is meaningful--but the book doesn't do much to dispel the myth. It also suggests sales is the solution for all problems. Darren teaches a few people sales over a couple days and--voila--they're successfully hired in business. It ignores all the gatekeepers--college degrees, internships, etc.--and suggests success is simply a result of tenacity.

And that's the biggest issue I had with the novel. Sure, it's quite aware of racism in American, but its counter to that is to revert back to a straightforward American Dream ideal. In the world of Black Buck, sales success is a result (solely) of bravado. And how do you learn bravado? You do crazy stunts like walk pass police drinking open beer cans and then run away. By that logic, teenage boys should be the most successful humans on the planet. Or, you demean and abuse people, and "what doesn't kill them makes them stronger." Uh... I certainly agree that confidence, swagger, and the knowledge of how to persuade another person are incredibly useful skills. But the book rarely teaches how to actually learn those skills. Instead, Darren takes a group out to an expensive dinner and then they skip the bill. They make a limited attempt to persuade the waiter that they shouldn't pay, then run away. How is that teaching sales? How does that make the group anything but jerks?

Darren's inconsistencies as a character and the convoluted ending also dampened my spirits for the novel. The book is so extreme that I think it shines less light on race and the business world than it could have.