The conventional wisdom of graduate school has it that a doctoral candidate’s dissertation needs to do one of two things to be considered successful in its field. It can either pose a thought-provoking question or it can use a unique methodology to approach an issue. There’s minimal chance it will do both. Kashana Cauley’s The Payback is a novel that also does two different things very well. It has a thoughtful premise and it is also well-written and really, really funny. This combination means that it is worth celebrating at length.
The premise sold me on the book immediately. What if a group of Black women in the middle of their careers still had endless amounts of student loan debt to pay back? What if they wanted to get payback on the predatory lenders instead? And, in doing so, what if they were able to eliminate student loan debt from all borrowers? You’d celebrate them as heroes if this were real life. Sadly, the United States is hellbent on making former college students as miserable as possible through these loans. Even when Biden could have fully canceled them, he didn’t. Trump has threatened to reinstate them, which is pure lunacy. We turn to fiction to live out the fantasies we can’t have in real life. It feels really good to read this book about three Black women willing to brave the waters with the federal student-loan sharks.
Maybe people living outside the U.S. won’t be able to relate to the idea of seeking vengeance on federal payment processors. Going to college for free means they can’t enjoy this book as deeply as I did. Their loss, I guess. Even so, there are plenty of ways that faceless organizations across the globe prevent people from living their lives because of bureaucratic stiff-arming. So there are likely ways it is relevant to a wider audience.
For those fortunate enough to not live with some kind of crippling debt, there are still plenty of cool parts in this book. Let’s think about the characters for a minute. Our narrator, Jada, had a glamorous past in costume design for a Hollywood studio. An event known for most of the book as only “the incident” changed her fortune and she now works in a clothing store in a tony mall near Los Angeles. Her two co-workers and eventual heist-mates are Audrey and Lanae. Like Jada, Audrey flamed out of a promising career under difficult circumstances. Lanae fronts a punk band known as The DONNER PARTY. Maybe it’s clear to you now that none of them have what you could call a comfortable standard of living, and that’s before you consider the turquoise-epauletted Debt Police who are there to make sure women like Jada, Lanae, and Audrey do not take advantage of their university educations. You’ll have to read the book to learn more about those fucks…
What’s fun about this group of colleagues turned something like friends is how Jada mercilessly rips on Audrey. Or, I should say, Cauley has her savage Audrey’s character throughout the early pages of the book. Audrey, in Jada’s telling, “never made hand gestures when she talked” (p. 51) and, when done ringing up customers at the register, “flip[s] back to her default dull self as neatly as a window blind snapping shut” (p. 72). There are plenty of other great descriptive phrases like those that give you the indication that Audrey suffers from the terminal affliction of being born without a personality. (I can relate.) Also clever are the explanations behind the movies and shows Jada used to work on in her earlier career—Appeal and Ride or Die being two highlights whose set-ups I won’t spoil. Each one had me dropping the book to the floor in laughter.
So you’ve got the intriguing premise from the start and plenty of interesting descriptions to carry you through the moments between the action. That’s good enough right there for me to recommend it and I haven’t even mentioned the way Cauley works in pop culture references such as PETER GABRIEL’s “Melt,” a few characters at a party who are “a pack of Lisa Bonets of different heights and weights but with the same telltale long, curly wig” (p. 47), and a reference to eating zucchini that would be “as smooth as a SADE album” (p. 121). Oh, that’s right. Jada takes on a job eating food on camera for the sake of the internet after her retail career ends. I don’t want to do any research into the descriptions of this type of money making, but Cauley again does an excellent job of making Jada’s eating episodes seem believably, uh, stimulating.
There are plenty more examples of enjoyable wordplay and exciting plot twists in the rest of the book, so I’ll just leave you with one moment that wasn’t just “good” in a literary sense, but made me rethink how I contextualize what I consume. Most of the first part of the book takes place in the mall where Jada et al. work. On her way into the clothing shop, Jada reflects on how “People say a good restaurant has terroir, and so does a mall. Its cinnamon rolls don’t taste the same in an airport, or at home. They taste right in the mall” (p. 60). Damn. Damn right, they do! A partygoer in college once remarked similarly that “Combos taste better when you’re rolling.” He meant in the car sense, not the inebriation sense, but the truth of the fact remains. Cauley makes a strong case here for the importance of context and all its tangibles and intangibles that make something as pleasant as a cinnamon roll taste just right only in a mall. As I’ve said repeatedly, this kind of close analysis and clear description of our shared reality is evidence of excellent writing. Enjoy The Payback for Cauley’s word choice and for the unique and thrilling ways that its characters engage in the most worthwhile heist possible.
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℞oxy by Neal Shusterman and Jarrod Shusterman
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