The title of Isabel Kaplan’s debut adult novel, NSFW, “not safe for work”, is apt. The book is about work, both in terms of how we spend our time and how we derive some part of our identity from what we do. The novel is set during 2012, and the unnamed protagonist has returned to her hometown of Los Angeles after graduating from Harvard. She decides she’d like to work in television and — thanks to a family connection — gets a job as an assistant at a network.
The work starts normally enough — ordering salads for her bosses and managing their eye-roll worthy complaints (“It’s your job to make sure I know what time it is. How am I supposed to know what time it is?”). It seems as though the novel may simply take us along as the protagonist rises through the ranks. But it takes a turn when one of her colleagues sexually assaults her. Soon after, a high-ranking man at the network is revealed to have sexually coerced several women, including the protagonist’s close work friend Allyn.
Allyn’s experience shocks the protagonist; the man is someone she and her mother know well, and who her mother insists is “one of the good ones.” The man is Jewish, like the protagonist and her mother, and in an interesting detail, the protagonist finds out about the assault only because Allyn asks, “what’s a tookis?” Allyn senses that the protagonist would know the Yiddish word for “butt.” The man had told Allyn she had the “best tuchus in the building,” using familiar, almost grandfatherly language. But the novel suggests that these small, seemingly benign comments are part of a larger whole — and in this instance were an awful precursor to sexual coercion. The novel is set five years before the allegations against Harvey Weinstein in 2017, and one wonders whether his specter loomed large as Kaplan — who also worked in film and television — was writing.
Near the end of the novel, the protagonist receives a call from the colleague who assaulted her; he presents her with a choice but never admits to his actions, only acknowledging that he was “an ass” to her because the promotion that had taken him years to get had seemingly come so easily to her. This suggests his “reason” for assaulting her was jealousy over work. There is something horrifying and almost absurd about that moment.
The protagonist’s reaction to her and Allyn’s assaults feels very true; she has experienced trauma but is also focused on their next steps: “Come forward and your career is probably tanked. Stay silent and he won’t have to answer for any of it.” Kaplan plays with the idea of ambivalence throughout the novel (“So what if I know it’s not my fault. How much good does that do”?). This idea is present at the end of the novel and while it is frustrating to have Kaplan elide a resolution, that seems to be her point — none of the choices in this scenario are satisfying.
