‘Break in Case of Emergency,’ by Jessica Winter
Jessica Winter’s bright debut novel, “Break in Case of Emergency,” tells the story of Jen, a woman in her early 30s who takes a job at a nonprofit foundation headed by a celebrity philanthropist.
The foundation aims to empower women, but its toxic workplace environment does anything but.
[...] Jen’s workplace ally, Daisy, is charmingly acerbic, and though we don’t know much of Daisy’s life outside the cubicle, she serves as a moral and intellectual center for both Jen and the book itself.
Unlike the painful exchanges between Jen and most of her co-workers, those between Jen and Daisy are witty and often playfully raucous, offering a welcome antidote to the empty cliches and generic (yet unfortunately recognizable) speech that mark the language of the foundation, the emptiness of common parlance.
The word “amazing” appears more times than I could count, characters are “big believers” in things, and banalities about motherhood — “there’s nothing like motherhood to make you honest” (this one uttered by a man) — and femininity abound, in a place where, Jen notes, “we’re not on board with the word feminism as an institution.”
[...] beneath all this chatter lies Winter’s complex and intelligent examination of women’s lives, privilege and power, and friendship.
The same sort of self-doubt that leads to upspeak, of which Jen is also a champion, keeps her from pursuing exposure for her art, but some unexpected, unsought recognition provides a significant turning point in the story.
Jen’s friends enjoy a quiet moneyed freedom, the sort that allows them to inhabit beautiful spaces, or to be “more aristocratic in ... proletariat garb because the uniform was a choice made possible by privilege, and the confidence borne of privilege.”
Jen, who does not share their privilege, realizes that while college is a great leveler, “marriage and childbearing and the ceremonies attendant upon them ... commemorated the reemergence of those stratifications for those who’d ignored or forgotten them.”