The Fantasy of Glamour and the Reality of Percarity
The Politics of Class in Marlowe Granados’ Happy Hour and the Evasion of Class in Most Mainstream Reviews
HAPPY HOUR is an imminently readable, well-crafted, and intelligent book. Its author, Marlowe Granados, certainly knows how to entertain, titillate, and push her readers into seeing realities that they usually prefer to either fully disregard or briefly acknowledge just to forget. Emphasized throughout the novel are issues of gender, race, and class – the latter usually ignored by those mainstream commentators who have, however begrudgingly, nevertheless come to acknowledge that America is still a place of grave injustice. Yet, Granados knows the spectrum of her audience, or at least, she is acutely mindful of the sensibilities and limitations of the reviewers that she must satisfy, if she does not want to sabotage commercial success. When she promotes her book, in interviews and public conversations, Granados highlights the glamorous parties, the unusual and intriguing settings, the fashionably high-brow early-20th century women’s-lit references, as well as the elegant and sensual movements of the young women at the center of it all, evoking explicit allusions to Geishas, as the author declares proudly in a YouTube conversation hosted by the well-known “Politics and Prose” independent bookstore in Washington/DC. In some ways, Happy Hour aims for readers who are likely to come for the cocktails but might stay for the class struggle, or at least are engaged by how the fantasy of glamor is buttressed by the reality of precarity.
In the interview/conversation that the “Politics and Prose” bookstore hosts, Granados talks with Rachel Syme, a staff writer from The New Yorker. The conversation, though not entirely without insights and humor, flows a little like elevator music. Granados describes the two protagonists of her novel as “mischievous” and “little minxes,” reminiscent of “adventuresses from the 1930s and 40s.” The literary and cultural paradigms she draws on for inspiration, both Granados and Syme agree, are the “life-style flapper” and the “screwball comedy.” Happy Hour is not a realist novel, Granados reveals, but a literary work that is deliberately stylized. Syme underscores this by reminding listeners of Granados’ dual background as a writer and a film maker. The novel takes place in New York City and “every day in New York could be a fantasy, a movie.”
Happy Hour is foremost a story of two young women in their early 20s, Isa and Gala, who decide to move to New York City in the summer of 2013. Especially Isa, despite her relatively young age of 21, has already lived in several large cities, such as London and Paris, spent summers travelling through Spain by train, and thus is more world-wise than most of her peers. Gala, we learn in contrast, has only been on an airplane once before.
Yet, both women are immigrants to the US, Gala coming originally from civil war-torn Yugoslavia while Isa is of Latina-Asian background. Not being US citizens or Green-card holders means they cannot legally work in New York City. That would not be a problem for the global rich of course, as they do not need to work in order to eat, drink, and find shelter in New York City or anywhere else on our planet. Gala and Isa are not from such a background of unearned privilege; they must find ways to pay the bills, or else. Thus, the novel follows their, at times, very creative and resourceful ways to make money, stay afloat, and hopefully prosper in some ways.
Naturally, Isa and Gala want to have fun along the way. They crave the excitement of “The City,” with its diversity, its energy, and its networking possibilities. It is summer, after all, and they realize that they are young only once. As the two women seek out the company of well-connected people, they discover that mingling with the rich comes at a price. Those who have risen to the top in America’s predatory capitalist society did not do so by being kind and compassionate souls. Gala and Isa attempt to connect with a diverse cast of affluent men and women, who range from being merely self-absorbed to openly predatory, only to eventually realize that the rich use and exploit whatever crosses their path, be it beauty, friendship, or labor. Isa’s friend Lilou is another aspiring young woman who, contrary to Isa and Gala, is very clear about her career goals and single-minded about pursuing them strategically, gives the pair some Machiavellian advice: “[r]emember, girls, if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu!” The rich who sample that menu have fully internalized the slogan of there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch for people outside their own social class. Isa and Gala thus will have to pay for whatever expensive drinks are offered to them as well as the various courses sooner or later, either by providing some sort of service and/or by suffering insults and humiliations. The upwardly mobile, on the other hand, more often than not have inherited their money and thus are accustomed to a steady diet of free lunches, all the while pontificating about the virtues of the meritocratic “free market” in ways that would make even Milton Friedman blush.
Reading Happy Hour was, overall, a joyful, evocative, and stimulating reading experience. The same cannot be said for the various reviews of the book, generated by feuilleton journalists who work for The New Yorker, The New York Times, Coveteur, and other outlets that bask in their status as guideposts of taste, witty banter, and just enough erudition to project cultural power. Suppressing one’s gag reflex is not always easy when confronted with the gap between their swank, on the one hand, and their far more modest insights, if any, on the other. To be fair, most of those who write either for the glossy magazines or the established journals and papers know how to compose stylistically sound sentences. They are capable to turn a phrase, to be clever in this or that observation, and they might even venture so far as to acknowledge that gender, race, and class are not merely words created by adversarial Leftist agitators who hate us for our freedom. Yet, they do not want us to dwell too much on those things, as that might darken an otherwise lighthearted cocktail party beyond the bounds of acceptable decorum. Ama Kwarteng, to cite but one example, announces, in her Coveteur review of the novel, that “Granados does a masterful job at touching on race and class without hitting the reader over the head with overused tropes or stale language” emphasis added.
One may wonder what particular “overused tropes” and “stale language” Kwarteng is referring to. Is she afraid that any real exploration of how socio-economic inequality, sexism, and racism in America are all interconnected -- how they reinforce each other, and thus provide the multi-dimensional tapestry on which the lives of the novel’s two main characters unfold -- and will hit too close to home? Zoe de Leon makes much of the same point when she praises Granados’ prose for evoking food insecurity, having no legal work visas, as well as being forced to rely on hand-outs from wealthy men, “without forcing overplayed tropes.” In lieu of those wretched “overplayed tropes,” de Leon glamorizes the protagonist’s experiences of want and exploitation thus: “[w]hat they lack in legal working visas and cash for groceries, they make up for in snappy charm, well-connected company, and the shamelessness to pursue unorthodox methods of funding like selling feet pics and working at a weekend market. These ventures are fueled by a dedication to a mortifying diet of cheap hot dogs and free drinks from generous men.”
Interestingly, de Leon does not seem to notice that Gala and Isa agonize over whether they should go to the foot fetish shoot, given that they would need a pedicure they cannot really afford and the fact that they may or may not get the gig after their feet have been inspected. Even here, it takes money to make money and those who have little of it are severely disadvantaged. Why such rather important details remain unnoticed by upwardly mobile literati is not difficult to figure out: being determines consciousness, as Marx put it.
Rachel Syme, the aforementioned staff writer from The New Yorker, stands out as one of the very few journalists who openly engage in the issues of inequality and leftist politics in Happy Hour. In fact, no other “established” reviewer has reflected upon Granados’ choice to go with Verso as her publisher in the United States. Syme introduces the subject by saying that Verso is “such a cool publishing house but I also think it is quite radical, you know, they publish a lot of socialist literature and sort of radical treatises on politics and economics. And I wonder where your book is radical?” Tellingly, no other of the myriad reviewers of Happy Hour seemed capable of grasping and/or probing the significance of Verso as the publisher of the US edition of the book. One can only speculate whether intellectual and cultural insularity or a chronic inability to rock the boat even slightly played a greater role here. Yet, even Syme, despite being willing to confront socio-economic issues, did so only very briefly and at the very end of her interview with Granados. To be precise, merely three minutes and forty-six seconds were devoted to that topic, out of a conversation that lasted almost forty-five minutes prior to audience questions.
I readily admit a strong temptation to hit certain people over the proverbial head especially if they find shame, however disguised behind humorous language, in sex work and even selling items at an outside market -- but not in a predatory capitalist system that deliberately denies many millions of people work visas and keeps them purposefully confined in the highly exploitative shadow economy. Kwarteng and de Leon seem far more rattled by the “devil-may-care youth” and “hedonistic life-style,” as the latter puts it, than by American capitalism’s slow-motion apocalypse. Whatever injustices and sufferings the two protagonists of the novel face, de Leon informs us in her review that they ultimately deserve them, due to their departure from petite-bourgeois conventions and traditional career paths. “The consequences and subjugation these women face as a result of their debauchery is subtly implied when reading about their dates gone wrong and the casual racism in Filipina Salvadoran Isa’s way.” Really? Sexism, racism, and class exploitation transpire as a supposed consequence of “debauchery,” consisting chiefly of selling clothing and modelling without a work visa? It is rather nauseating when such upwardly mobile journalists then proceed to present themselves as fashionably “woke” – albeit without “hitting the reader over the head” with too many pesky observations about the structural reasons for racism, sexism, and inequality in our society.
I cannot shake the impression that the refusal on the part of many mainstream journalists and establishment “intellectuals” to engage in any meaningful acknowledgement, let alone discussion, of class structure and inequality in contemporary US society is not just based on their ideological function as enforcers of ruling-class ideology. In addition to being, with minor variations, the guardians and gatekeepers of the intellectual and cultural status quo, they display an almost perplexing level of ignorance, myopia, and vanity. They seem fully encapsulated in their own assumptions, norms, and presuppositions, having lost any sense of both the past and the future as possibly different from their world. They appear blind to anything outside of their own narrow experiences, no matter how important or obvious.
A striking example of this peculiar blindness is Granados’ invocation of Thomas Piketty and his famous book Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Isa and Gala resolve, after having attended many parties, gallery openings, and other more socially oriented events, to do something for their cerebral lives. They purchase a copy of The New Yorker and peruse its pages for nearby events that might stimulate the life of the mind. Gala finally selects a presentation by “a French-economic theorist who seemed quite popular and even had a best-selling book that, from what I read, got attention from literary circles.” Gala is convinced that this presentation in particular has all the right credentials to prod their intellectual potential. She thus exclaims enthusiastically “[t]his one looks the most boring. That’ll be what you want.”
Without the naming of names, the context makes it clear that the guest of honor, a well-known economist, who gives a presentation followed by a discussion focused on inequality, is none other than Piketty. Granados displays her wicked sense of humor by conjuring a scene where Piketty, in addition to receiving applause and friendly questions, also has to put up with the more obtuse specimen of the well-heeled, who allege that his numbers, which so meticulously document massively growing inequality under capitalism as a core feature of this system itself, are of course grossly exaggerated and do not reflect the true and more evenhanded as well as meritocratic reality in this best of all possible worlds of ours. To everyone’s surprise, Gala suddenly stood up, and, ignoring the kleptocratic ideologue and his diatribe completely, zeros in on the well-meaning upscale Liberals and tells them that they have no reason to be concerned about rising inequality. After all, they are on the winning side.
Granados writes with apt sarcasm that “[t]he main theorist went through a bunch of numbers and years and countries to confirm what Gala and I already knew to be true: that rich people are almost always getting richer because of things like dynasty. That is one thing Gala and I do not have. He called it a new Belle Époque, which I thought was quite pretty. Gala whispered to me, ‘Do you think they have a list of who’s in the One Percent?’ for Gala knows that would certainly make our time in New York much easier.”
One would have thought that such a provocative intervention on Gala’s part, plus the involvement of one of the most influential critiques of contemporary capitalism written by a mainstream economist during the last decade, would have been worth a comment or two by at least some of the establishment reviewers of the novel. Sadly, they did not want to hit us over the head with quite so much to think about -- or perhaps they found themselves a bit hit over the head with the task of decoding basic references to the realities of our time.
Granados wrote the character of Gala as a complex and infuriatingly contradictory person. A political refugee who is resolutely a-political, a young woman without financial or educational resources but full of aspirations to somehow join the rich and famous, and a person who is shamelessly exploited and taken advantage of -- all the while she identifies with, and takes the side of, the people who exploit, cheat, and mislead her. Gala is very bright and yet self-sabotaging. Underneath the story of Gala and Isa as playful and mischievous “little minxes” is the ugliness of American capitalism, which requires and mass-produces class exploitation, gender oppression, and racism. Those things are written into its core logic.
Isa and Gala discover at some point in the novel that they are being badly overcharged for the rent of their Bed-Stuy sublet. Barely able to buy groceries, the two young women have an increasingly hard time suppressing their financial worries. “Each time I thought about the end of the month approaching, my stomach dropped” laments Isa, confiding in her downstairs neighbor “that Gala was still short of her half of the rent.” But she does not understand why, stating “[h]ow is that possible? I see you girls. You are working at all times of night. If you can’t afford the rent out here, those damn hippies are ripping you off.” Isa informs everyone in the room how much she and Gala have to pay for their tiny sublet to Maggie, the financially secure young “hippie” they rent from. It turns out that Isa and Gala pay Maggie about three times the actual rent that Maggie pays. Isa voices disgust over how exploitative Maggie and Alex, the two women who rented the entire house themselves for a mere twelve hundred dollars per month, are for charging everyone they sublet to so much more than they themselves are paying. “I gasped. ‘But they’re rich already!’ Gala cocked her head. ‘So what? Good for them. Tell me you wouldn’t do the same if you were in their position.”
Isa, on the other hand, is incensed: “[i]t became clear that Gala and I were financing Maggie’s freewheeling summer of surf at her place in Rockaway Beach. Because of her, I can’t remember the last time I ate a vegetable.” Gala slowly but steadily comes to share Isa’s anger about being taken advantage of, and both decide to confront Maggie at her beach rental. “Doesn’t Maggie know Far Rockaway is still Queens?” They two women eventually find Maggie near the beach, in a juice bar, “sipping at a carrot and ginger smoothie. At least someone was getting her nutrients,” Isa notes wryly, doubtlessly recalling her own lacking access to produce.
Gala’s display of Stockholm Syndrome is sadly characteristic for a considerable portion of the working class. It is not that she thinks that she is not being cheated or that capitalism is fair. That much Gala has already made clear when she told the mostly self-congratulatorily well-meaning, well-off liberals in Thomas Piketty’s audience that the system is of course heavily biased in favor of the rich, designed to make them even richer. Yet, she cannot imagine an alternative to it any longer, as the structures of capitalism effectively undermine collective resistance and thus make individualistic solutions appear far more realistic, at least in the short run. Gala does not believe she can fight her exploiters and thus seeks ways to join them.
When confronted with her predatory practices, Maggie regains her composure and insists that Isa and Gala either pay what she demands or leave her sublet so that she can rent it to somebody else. When asked why she so shamelessly overcharged them, Maggie has no problem coming up with a quick reply. “Maggie stood up from the bench and said it wasn’t her fault we weren’t familiar with real-estate prices...For someone who seemingly prided herself on being spiritually non-materialistic, Maggie really doubled down. She said, ‘[i]f you can’t afford it, someone else can. I had Plans for my summer.’ Gala was stunned. ‘So did we!...’” As both women are dejected by their failed attempt to negotiate a fairer deal by appealing to Maggie’s apparently non-existing conscience, Isa recalls the parting words of one their neighbors: “[h]ow do you think the rich get richer? They screw the vulnerable -- and that’s you, honey.”
That is indeed a befitting description of capitalism, especially in its contemporary form here in the United States. It is painfully clear that reviewers from their various self-styled, highbrow, and middlebrow outlets would not be willing, or able, to engage the books Piketty has written since Capital in the 21st Century appeared in bookstores around the globe. Among his newest works is a volume titled Time for Socialism: Dispatches from a World on Fire. Whatever one might think of those essays, written between 2016 and 2021, they illustrate his shift from Left-Liberalism to Left-Social Democracy. At the same time, even stalwart defenders of Liberalism as the only path to salvation, like Francis Fukuyama, have become acutely aware of the structural instability and the contradictions within their cherished fantasy of “liberal capitalism,” as Fukuyama’s latest book Liberalism and Its Discontents documents.
One should not expect so much from a mainstream review, given the overall intellectual illiteracy on the part of those who pride themselves in knowing what they so clearly do not. Yet, is it truly too much to hope that a few of them would have at least read the novel attentively enough to notice and savor Granados’ critique of the self-satisfied and self-referential liberal intellectualism that tries to be judicious and nuanced but usually ends up being ineffective at best and openly supportive of the status quo at worse?
Isa and Gala are invited by a Columbia University professor, who takes a shine to their spark and lack of pious deference, to a gathering of writers, essayists, and journalists at a bar near a bookstore where a reading just took place. One of the people in attendance, “[a] man who had gone to Yale and edited a magazine called Harper’s asked whether I ‘dabbled’ in writing myself because, he said ‘You seem to do everything else.’” Gala, who overhears this conversation, is intrigued by the mere mentioning of Harper’s but loses all interest when she discovers that it is not connected to the Bazaar. However, the joke is not on her but on this group of largely useless liberal intellectuals.
“These men spoke as though a revolution were going to start right from that very bar – as though what they did was necessary and vital to the world. I can hardly understand how they came to think that way. From what I gather, they write essays in magazines that have small circulations and publish biannually. I wonder how it would be to simply exist and feel my voice was necessary and vital without doing much work at all.”
Happy Hour is neither agitprop nor merely a lightweight novel about up-to-date lifestyle flappers. It is a clever story about two young women who came to New York City for cocktails and adventure and indeed found an ample supply. Yet, they also found out firsthand how the rich get rich and keep getting richer by being predatory and exploitative thugs, no matter what mask they hide under -- they use you even when you believe that you are using them.
What Happy Hour does not provide is any intimation, any hint, any possibility of overcoming the roots of what torments Isa and Gala, as well as all of us: capitalism. The system itself is not named, not conceptualized as an imposed system of domination, and any escape is conceivable only in the most individualistic terms. The women’s desperate and futile attempt to join the upper crust or to go to the next big (or small) city merely reproduces the same pathology of use and abuse in slightly altered form. Marlowe Granados does not retreat from class as much as she retreats from class struggle, which requires a collective response that is socially and historically specific, as Ellen Meiksins Wood has argued in many of her books, including her classic The Retreat from Class.
Axel-Fair Schulz is an Associate Professor of Modern European History at SUNY Potsdam. A native East German, he has lived in North America for the last three decades. He is the author, editor, and co-editor of several books and articles on modern German and labor history.