There’s a recent spate of American novels which expose the toxic reality of apparently exciting jobs. The Nanny Diaries featured a young white woman working as a nanny for wealthy New Yorkers, and revealed that the employers were jealous, self-centered, stingy and suspicious. The Devil Wears Prada featured a young white woman who gets hired as an assistant to a barely pseudonymous Anna Wintour, and revealed that her employer was a self-important, dictatorial, emotionally abusive boss. At first, The Other Black Girl seems like a similar expose, with a first-time author who is a young black woman who worked in the publishing industry.
Who makes the decisions, who gets published and why, who writes about people of colour, and what are the non-white characters in books like? These are the questions that face (or should face!) a publisher today. In the fictional Wagner publishing house of this novel, The Black Lives Matter movement has prompted some diversity soul-searching, but confusion reigns about the goals.
“Do we mean diverse employees or diverse books? Or do we mean diverse authors? Didn’t we publish this book by that Black writer just last year?”
Nella, our protagonist, is the only black person at Wagner.
You gotta be twice as good, remember? […] her brown skin meant she needed to be twice as good as the girl with white skin.
Nella is thus, implicitly, the point person for diversity issues. The author does a very nice (and funny!) job of describing the endless microagressions she faces.
[At a ‘diversity town hall’]: When Nella offered up the acronym ‘BIPOC’ as a term she associated with diversity, her coworkers ooh-yeahed … and then offered their own examples of ‘diversity’: ‘left-handedness’, ‘nearsightedness’, ‘dyslexia’. […] And just like that, faster than it took to utter the words ‘what about ageism?’ the moderator was bowing her head and lauding everyone — the one hundred or so people in the room — all white save for Nella — for being so open.
A well-known Wagner author has just written a new novel about the opioid crisis which features a single black character, Shartricia.
Shartricia was less than one-dimensional. [..] Her white male creator had rendered her nineteen and pregnant with her fifth child, with a baby daddy who was either a man named LaDarnell or a man named DeMontraine (Shartricia could not confirm which because both men had fled town as soon as they’d heard). She cussed and moaned in just about all of her scenes, isolating herself from her family and non-opioid-addicted friends (of which she had few).
Nella is appalled by this portrayal, but her boss is one of those who only pays lip service to diversity, and Nella is still figuring out how to make her points without threatening her job. So she is thrilled when Wagner hires a new young black woman, Hazel. Hazel’s attitude and confidence stand in contrast to Nella’s own insecurity. But soon enough she discovers that Hazel is undermining her.
Many people have compared this novel to Jordan Peele’s film Get Out, and the parallels are obvious. An apparently innocent situation drifts into race-based social commentary, then gets weirder and eventually surreal, but is cuttingly pointed throughout. In this case, Nella starts getting notes at work telling her to ‘LEAVE WAGNER’. She is increasingly on edge with Hazel’s calm ascent in the company, Hazel’s ability to find the delicate balance between speaking out and assimilating, and most of all, Hazel’s cool authenticity. Hazel, it seems, was born and brought up in Harlem, has started a charity, and wears dreadlocks, while Nella grew up privileged in Connecticut and has a white boyfriend.
Is Nella just insecure, is Hazel just savvier about office politics, or is Nella really being sidelined by the other black girl?
In parallel, there are chapters in other black women’s voices, some set in 1983. Diana was a writer who wrote a book that was seminal in Nella’s life. And Diana had a black editor, Kendra Rae Phillips, at Wagner. Both have now vanished, mysteriously. There is another black woman, Shani, skulking around New York with some undefinable purpose. These other plotlines were confusingly complicated, and for me, remained somewhat murky to the end.
Hair does not often feature prominently in office politics, but is a loaded issue for black women. Nella, due to her white-suburb upbringing, does not know how to “do flat twists”, and has only just stopped straightening her hair. One event is set in a black salon, and a black barbershop plays an infrequent role. No spoilers, but hair is a prominent strand (couldn’t resist that!) in this novel.
It seems strange to say this about a book written by someone in publishing, and which is about publishing, but I wish it had been edited more tightly. The plot could have been quite a bit more focused, and there were way too many words spent on trivia like the office coffee machine, someone’s difficulty in opening an envelope, or how much better the furniture in the boss’ office is than the underlings. The ending, too, was abrupt and a little unsatisfying.
So, not a literary tour-de-force, but it does have a lot of interesting things to say, especially about representation, diversity and microaggressions.
Given what you say, the front cover seems extremely apt! It sounds like a book which takes on many interesting topics, but isn’t particularly deft in its handling of them.
Just saw this book in a London bookshop, the cover was not as good as this one, it is a yellow cover showing just a comb, not the hair. Since you say hair is a big deal in the story, then the US cover seems more representative. Glad of your review warning that the writing is not sterling, otherwise I’d have been tempted to pick this up, because the subject matter seemed so interesting.
I do like the comb with the black-power fist on the cover!
That said, I think at least the first half of the book is worth reading, because the author does well at describing the realities of work life for black Americans in environments where they are often the only black person around. The code-switching with accents and grammar, the microaggressions, and so on.
I think the author just tried to go a bit too far with the plot, which became too complicated for me — just too many voices. But that might be me, so do give it a try.