Book Review: "The Boys' Club" by Erica Katz
“The Boys’ Club” by Erica Katz
Bookshop | Kindle
Publisher Synopsis: Alex Vogel has always been a high achiever who lived her life by the book--star student and athlete in high school, prelaw whiz in college, Harvard Law School degree. Accepting a dream offer at the prestigious Manhattan law firm of Klasko & Fitch, she promises her sweet and supportive longtime boyfriend that the job won't change her.
Yet Alex is seduced by the firm's money and energy . . . and by her cocksure male colleagues, who quickly take notice of the new girl. She's never felt so confident and powerful--even the innuendo-laced banter with clients feels fun. In the firm's most profitable and competitive division, Mergers and Acquisitions, Alex works around the clock, racking up billable hours and entertaining clients late into the evening. While the job is punishing, it has its perks, like a weekend trip to Miami, a ride in a client's private jet, and more expense-account meals than she can count.
But as her clients' expectations and demands on her increase, and Alex finds herself magnetically drawn to a handsome coworker despite her loving relationship at home, she begins to question everything--including herself. She knows the corporate world isn't black and white, and that to reach the top means playing by different rules. But who made those rules? And what if the system rigged so that women can't win, anyway?
When something happens that reveals the dark reality of the firm, Alex comes to understand the ways women like her are told--explicitly and implicitly--how they need to behave to succeed in the workplace. Now, she can no longer stand by silently--even if doing what's right means putting everything on the line to expose the shocking truth.
Shannon’s Rating: 2
Elizabeth’s Rating: 1.5
Trigger Warnings: sexual assault, sexual harassment, rampant drug use
Shannon’s Review: This book was a highly anticipated summer release, and it came highly recommended by a few bloggers I follow. However, I found “The Boys’ Club” sorely lacking and full of some blatant errors that really took me out of the narrative.
At face value, this book sounds right up my alley: an ambitious young law school grad starts working at a white-shoe law firm and slowly realizes how misogynistic the culture is. Unfortunately, I didn’t find myself rooting for Alex at all, given how willing she was to participate in the system until she was (mild spoiler alert) sexually assaulted herself (despite also being sexually harassed throughout much of the book). She also wasn’t well-developed as a character; on her first day at the law firm, she and her live-in boyfriend discuss how she doesn’t want to work with the M&A team, but then 2 days later, she’s all of a sudden desperate to be accepted by their…wait for it…boys’ club.
The early errors that indicated this book was going to annoy me:
as Alex takes in the downtown view from her midtown office, she refers to One World Trade at “The Freedom Tower.” No one calls that building The Freedom Tower except tourists. (Although Alex had just moved to New York from Boston so this could be excused.)
And Alex refers a few times to the fact that she was the junior world record holder in the 50m and 400m freestyle, but didn’t swim relays.
1. at that level of swimming, you are generally a sprinter or a distance swimmer—not both.
2. if you’re that good, you do a relay or two as part of your team.
That shit is easy to fact check.
Anyway, those observations are obviously not the point of the book, but if they can’t fact check minor swimming points for the character’s backstory, what else is wrong?
I did not go to law school and I’m not a lawyer, so I’ll leave a lot of the legal fact-checking to Elizabeth, but I found the book too full of too many disappointing stereotypes to really be interesting.
The one Black character (who knows he is the “token” at the firm) spirals out of control at the law firm and is basically treated as a cautionary sideshow to the plot.
The women are pitted against each other (both by the firm and themselves), and the protagonist even at one point claims she “just gets along with men better.” It’s 2020—I thought we retired the “cool girl” trope a few years ago.
Lastly, we’re spoiler-free here but I found the ending incredibly unsatisfying. Alex’s partner mentor at the firm (who is largely absent throughout the book as she reschedules meeting after meeting with Alex) demonstrates intergenerational infighting among women in a way I found super distasteful. Essentially, “we were sexually harassed so you could get a job here decades later; just put up with it” is a bad take. Although I’m certain that still happens, I found it a gross conclusion to an underwhelming book.
There are many legal books with a feminist angle I’d recommend over this one. “The Boys’ Club” was a miss for me.
Elizabeth’s Review: I hated this book. Everything about it bothered me. Literally everything.
Admittedly, I only started reading this one after Shannon complained about it via Gchat, and so I went in skeptical as to how good it could be. I was horrified to realize my skepticism wasn’t enough.
One of the blurbs on this book says that this provides sharp insight into all it entails to succeed as a woman in corporate America — and I would disagree on all fronts. Not only am I a lawyer, I (gasp!) work in corporate America, and never have I been given a demeaning nickname, been pitted against the other women in my office, or asked to humiliate myself for the sake of clients. And I work in lobbying. I know that my lived experience isn’t the end-all, be-all, so I reached out to a few fellow female attorneys who work in big law (one even works in M&A!) and they said the author was full of it.
Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if this book was written by a dude (Erica Katz is a pen name) because it was a whole lot of white male glorifying nonsense. The women at the center of the novel ONLY aspire to impress the men and get in their boys club. Note, I’m not saying that women don’t have a harder time succeeding in Big Law (they definitely do! the American Bar Association has done studies on it!), but there’s no way a woman that worked in this setting would write this novel where she seems to admire the setting. Alex doesn’t have an issue with the “boys club” until she’s…sexually assaulted by a client. She’s fine with being humiliated and is blinded by competition to the point of changing everything about herself, and she seems to give no f*cks about anyone in her life outside of the partners and senior associates in her group.
I guess it’s time to talk about Alex now? I found her deeply unlikable and quite annoying — honestly, what was the focus on clothes?! — which is unfortunate as we spend the whole book in her head. At the beginning, she’s about to start at a new law firm, she’s interested in work life balance, she’s supportive and thoughtful and coming off working in the social justice space. Within 15 pages, she’s completely changed everything about herself, and the rest of the book is just a continued departure from the character we were introduced to. She’s as misogynistic as the men she works with, she’s selfish, and for being someone super driven, she’s not that smart as written — like, it took her 3.5 months of work and 76 pages in the book to actually look at the primary source law she was practicing. I cannot…
Instead of elaborating on why I didn’t like her, I’ve pulled some choice quotes from the book that highlight Alex as a protagonist (with some commentary because I can’t help myself.
On Mergers and Acquisitions
“I think I was probably most motivated by the prestige. M&A was the most well respected group at the firm. I think I’ve always been driven to be the best at whatever it is I do.” — she literally starts the book promising her boyfriend she won’t do M&A, and she is not the best at anything she does.
“Ugh. M&A is such a boys’ club…I shrugged, ‘I like boys.’” - I hate the cool girl trope, and I thought we were past this.
“They can’t afford women. Women get pregnant and go on maternity leave, and the group is too busy to absorb all the work of another partner when they do.” - note: a woman said this to another woman. Can we retire this particular strain of argument in 2020?
“I saw it: my cheating with a serial adulterer, my assault by a rich scumbag, my entire existence in corporate America, was just so…typical. I realized what I had always feared to be true since my world records were shattered. I wasn’t special at all, I was just like every other pathetic person I knew.” - you are pathetic, tbh.
On Firm Culture
“At Klasko, I didn’t really know my friends at all. It didn’t matter to me that he couldn’t yet pay rent or take me to nice dinners. I’d turned down a job at Sanctuary so I could do those things for myself, and for him. I knew one day soon Sam’s company would be successful, that it would all even out in the end.” — except wait, she doesn’t think the concept is viable, doesn’t think that Sam works during the day, and increasingly resents that he isn’t a lawyer…plus cheats on him emotionally and physically without remorse
“You were there because you’re a woman. An attractive, well-behaved, goody-two-shoes woman.” - who says this to someone? Ever.
“Two simultaneous but disparate emotions cropped up in my chest: terror that if I continued in BigLaw, I’d inevitably become cold and rigid like Vivienne, and exhilaration that if I continued in BigLaw, I’d become a fashionable, beautiful, intelligent, and successful partner like Vivienne.”
On Feminism
“The offense I might have taken when sober to not being treated professionally dissolved and was replaced by some shallowly buried middle school complex about being the broad shouldered girl when skinniness was in and the outspoken one when guys liked passive girls.”
“I didn’t know what to say. Part of me wanted to tell him he couldn’t speak to me that way — that it was harassment. But it didn’t feel like harassment. It felt like a compliment. I wasn’t even certain if a client could harass me — he wasn’t my employer after all.”
“Was this what trailblazing for all women looked like? Doing coke with clients, betraying my gender by lying to a colleague’s wife, and last but not least, having sex in my office with a partner?”
Shannon covered some of the other points that annoyed me above, so I won’t belabor this further. I am just so annoyed that this had promise — the premise is great, but I feel so angry by the execution.
TL;DR: Just don’t read it. It’s sexist, it’s stereotypical, it’s uneven - and there are many better books out there if you’re looking for something in this lane.
If you liked this, try:
“A Good Marriage” by Kimberly McCreight (Bookshop | Kindle) (Shannon’s review here)
“The Herd” by Andi Bartz (Bookshop | Kindle) (Moira’s review here!)
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