The assistants

At the gym I go to a few mornings a week I hear rush hour radio DJs talk. It’s a man and a woman and they banter, mostly about celebrities, sometimes about current events. They’re going for humor and insight but they’re so uninformed and witless that I’m surprised that anyone listens to them.

The Assistants is like a book version of them.

The plot is predicable and the writing amateurish. Few paragraphs lack at least one cliché, and those are the ones with uninspired pop culture references. There is not one original or memorable sentence in it. It’s as vapid as its characters, who fall into doing a good—though wildly implausible—thing through embezzlement at the large media corporation they work for. The main character, Tina, writes with the passé slang of a teenager (“Don’t even”) despite being thirty and having a degree in literature. There’s an obvious incipient lesbian theme that remains unexplored to a degree that you wonder if the author herself is even aware of it. (“She removed the silk scarf that had been modestly wrapped around her ample chest, and for a split second I felt my eyes bulge out like Bugs Bunny’s,” the Tina says.)

Every few pages had such dumb mistakes that it takes you out of what little plot there is. It’s 2015 and the computer mouse for the assistant of a major media corporation’s CEO still has a trackball? Really?

My copy of The Assistants was an uncorrected proof, but I doubt much will change between that version and the one that will be out in May. Besides, no amount of editing could save this book. It’s structure is too weak. I finish books I start, but with this one I kept hoping someone would change the station.