Hot Desk by Laura Dickerman I Narrative Edge Video Podcast
Coming up on this episode, hurt people hurt people, right? So are we learning the way he was hurt? I guess you’re not gonna tell me. That’s what I’m curious about. Well, we find it funny the way 20-year-olds talk. Me too, that means we’re old now. Some of the scenes in the book are very disturbing. Yeah. Okay, so rom-com. What are we talking about? This podcast from Georgia Public Broadcasting highlights books with Georgia connections. Posted by your two favorite public radio book nerds who also happen to be your hosts of all things considered on GPB Radio. I’m Peter B. Yellow. And I’m Orlando. Thanks for joining us as we introduce you to authors, their writings, and the insights behind their stories, mixed with our own ideas, thoughts about… Just what gives these works the narrative edge. All right, Orlando, what are we talking about with the book selection today? Well, today we’re going to talk about the difference between the art and the artist. And perhaps I’ll start with a question. Is there an artist, a writer, or really anyone that you really, really like his or her work, but this person really troubles you as a person? No, there are a few, but the first one that comes to mind, and almost ashamed to talk about this because of just the stereotype of the white guy writer type, but David Foster Wallace, he’s a writer whose work I really enjoyed. I’ve never finished Infinite Jest, I should say, but his shorter work I enjoy. But he’s problematic because he was a stalker. He gave his ex-girlfriend a really hard time. And he had a lot of mental issues and died by suicide in 2008. Um, but if he had lived to present day, he likely would have been canceled by now for everything that he had. Well, we know about Ernest Hemingway and his problems and his troubles. We know about people like Bill Cosby. I remember I used to go to a karaoke where there was several rules, but among them was you couldn’t sing R. Kelly. So if you wanted to sing I Believe I Could Fly, you can’t do that one. Is Michael Jackson okay? I’m just curious. Michael Jackson was Wow, selective. OK. So, anyways, you know, this book is really about the difference between the art and the artist and it’s also a romantic comedy. Okay, romantic comedy, and that’s not really where I thought this was going, but cool. Well, it’s a rom-com and it’s about this serious topic and promise me, I promise you, it works. The book also could be considered a workplace satire. It could be a literary mystery. So if any of those things sort of appeal to you, this is the book for you. It’s called Hot Desk by Laura Dickerman. She’s a writer from Atlanta. Does that term need a little explaining? I mean, is it hot desk like a hot sheet motel, but a hot desk? Hot desk, never heard of hot desk. Never heard of a hot desk? Hot desk is a term that refers to a workplace condition where you share a desk with other people. Like maybe you have it in the morning, someone has it on the afternoon, maybe you it on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, someone else has it Thursday, Friday. You know, different days. Or maybe it’s just like an open concept workplace where you shared offices. So that’s what we mean by hot desk And does this take place in an era before remote work became such a thing? This place takes place in 2020, 21, it’s sort of pandemic era. Okay. You have to suspend disbelief that this is not an option for them and go for it. I think that was the timeline. I think because they were doing a lot of Zooms. Oh, okay. So, if they were Zooms, remote work could have been possible, but for the sake of this story. Yeah. They need to share this desk. So for the sake of the story, our two main characters, Rebecca and Ben, are sharing a hot desk in a New York City office that’s shared by rival publishing companies. So they each work for two different publishing companies, but they share the same desk. They’re both really junior employees. They’re in their 20s at this publishing company. They’re competing for a chance to land their companies a big publishing deal. And that’s the rights to publish the unpublished work of a recently deceased author, a literary giant of the 20th century, sort of a fictionalized amalgamation of, you know, Ernest Hemingway or some of the people we’ve been talking about. It makes no sense to tell you, you know, the fictional author’s name because he goes in the book simply by. And here’s Laura Dickerman to tell us about the lion. The character of the lion, I call him, is kind of a, sort of a mix of different writers at the time, I would guess, but I also wanted to transcend an actual person. I wanted to create someone that would symbolize or stand for this kind of man that I’m interested in, so someone with the, I know, the charisma of Byron and the popularity of Hemingway and the talent of Philip Roth and just make him this very charismatic. Genius writer, but also someone who acts with impunity and treats particularly, I would say, women in a way that’s problematic. So I was very interested in that, again, in the guise of a rom-com. So does she ever explain what got the guy canceled? Well, he wasn’t exactly canceled. It was just sort of like as time progresses, things change and at some point people, but especially women just kind of get like an ick factor to him. So he kind of has like bad marketing now. Sort of like these artists that we mentioned earlier. And it’s just like the way he talked about women, the way women were portrayed in his books, sort of hyper masculine persona. And so this marketing problem is going to be a problem for our two main characters. Again, these two junior publishing reps who want to get his unpublished works published. OK, so tell us why it’s a problem. So the lion just died and we find out that he doesn’t just have like a few notes that are unpublished. He has an entire novel that’s unpublish. It’s like sitting in a secret place in his house slumbling on, you know, handwritten paper and it’s a very bad novel. I mean, it’s bad from a writing perspective and it bad from problematic women’s perspective. And so whichever one of our romantic leads, Ben or Rebecca, lands the deal, is going to be moving up in the company. But to land the deal one of them will have to convince the lion’s widow that he or she is the best one to carry on the lion legacy. Wow, and what is the widow’s interest? What does she primarily care about? Is it just… You know, she’s interested in money somewhat, but she’s not as interested in money as the lion’s son. So there’s a character in the book that’s the lion son. He’s really caring about money. He just wants the dollars. But the widow, she is more concerned about the legacy of her late husband. And she controls the estate. So the problem for Ben and Rebecca becomes exactly what we’re talking about. How are we going to present him in his death? What’s the right thing to do? And so let’s take it from a number of perspectives. First, Ben’s perspective. The most interesting evolution, I would say, in the book is the young character of Ben Heath, who’s one of the romantic leads. And he’s a young man who idolizes the lion. He has grown up reading his books. He has gone into publishing because of the books. And so I feel as though he’s the character who has a bit of a, I could say, comeuppance. But it’s also evolution. And so he learns to reconcile the. Bad behavior of the man with the genius of the books. And I think he doesn’t want to, I don’t love this expression, but throw the baby out with the bathwater. Hmm, so I’m curious how he reconciles those two things. How does he evolve as well? Well, sort of Ben learns through the course of the book, as the reader does, more about the lion, more about this unpublished novel, and we also learn more about the lion through the personal stories of Rebecca, his love interest, and they eventually do meet at some point. So, wait, what did they learn about the lion that would change the way they feel about the… I’m thinking about aspects of his… I am going to not answer that one. Is that a plot point that would ruin things? I think that is a thing that you have to discover. Well, that’s really important, because that’s what occurred to me, like is there something about this guy that would make me feel like, okay, he did some awful things, but I could see what led him to do those things. I mean, hurt people hurt people, right? So are we learning the way he was hurt? I guess you’re not gonna tell me. That’s what I’m curious about. Well, we learn more of the good and we learn more of bad, I’ll say that. And you can imagine what bad is as it relates to women and treating them badly. Well, yeah, I mean, I’ve read a thing or two about the publishing industry, and especially when, you know, the white men, you know, the boomer generation and older have had the control of things. And it was not a good scene for women. So you can you can imagine all the things that happen. Some of the scenes in the book are very disturbing. Yeah, okay. So rom-com. Were we talking about around? We’re talking about a rom-com. We’re taking about a Rom-com, yes. Well, they don’t meet Rebecca and Ben until more than halfway through the book. So, and that’s what I like about this book in some way. It’s gotten multiple different aspect through it, but spoiler here, Ben and Rebecca don’t meet until later in the book, and they will have a happy ending. But they get together first when all of the main characters come together for sort of like a business meeting, you know. The most romantic of settings, a business meeting. Well, if it’s love at first sight, that’s what it was. Footsie under the table, perhaps. Yeah, it was love at first sight. I mean, we’ve all been there. You see someone and even though they’re competitors, they’ve been, you know, they’ve been, knocking on each other. You see, that’s the wrong word. No, it might be the right word. They’ve been spatting at each other through office email and through subtle placements of office furniture and things like that. So anyways, they finally meet. And we see their relationship go from cold to hot, hot and spicy. Hot and spicy. Okay. Well, so that’s Ben. Tell us a little bit more about Rebecca. What’s her background, how does she evolve? So she has an evolution as well, and it’s just as complicated as Ben’s. Rebecca’s evolution is informed by her mother. When you see Rebecca, who’s this young woman in publishing and very confident and says what she thinks and has very strong opinions about these men, the discovery of this unpublished manuscript of the Lions reveals a very surprising link to Rebecca’s mother, Jane, who worked 40 years earlier at the Lions Literary Magazine, what I call the East River Review. And when the novel goes back in time, 40 years, you pick up with Jane, who is also a young woman in publishing, and her experience is very different from her daughter’s 40 years later. And so I was interested in comparing the two, the mirroring of the two timelines and of the experience of women in publishing both then and now. Okay, so there’s a 40-year difference in some of the scenes here. How does that back-and-forth work timewise? Is there two separate tracks and 40 years difference? Not it’s not throughout the book and that’s what I like about it. Some books are really annoying with this sort of back-and-forth timeline situation But in this book and when I say annoying, I mean, it’s just like constantly going back and forth I mean in this it’s really focused in in sort of one section of the book I think and it’s only used when needed and it needed To you know, sort of tell the tale of what happened to Rebecca’s mother 40 years ago and it sort of also gets to the question of why are why are Ben and Rebecca here? Because as I mentioned, you know, these are junior level employees why are junior level employees being sent to see the widow of a literary giant to Negotiate a publishing deal and so that’s why we go back in time to pick up those Relationships to learn more about the lion to learn about the widow to learn More about Rebecca’s mother And again, I don’t want to give away too much, but it’s part of what kept me reading. And that is, as Laura says in the clip just there, sort of the experiences of women in the workplace 40 years ago were much different, are much different than they are today. Yeah, speaking of the workplace part, right? We’ve talked about the romantic comedy part of this, but you also mentioned it was a workplace satire in some ways. Workplace satire, yeah. So tell me more about that. So the book is set in an office, obviously, and it’s set in this publishing world. And these two junior-level employees are making kind of witty, spot-on observations about their bosses. And they’re talking about their Zoom calls and their workplace apps. We use Teams. We use Zoom. We use any number of things. And that provides some humor in the book, you know, the way. Office’s work. I mean, who hasn’t had a funny Zoom call moment? I mean are you the guy in the Zoom call who points out when someone’s camera is on and they don’t think it’s on? I know you are, because you’ve done it to me. I know that your camera is on, your camera’s on. So this book interacts with communication technology in a way that’s funny and very realistic. So, and actually that’s part of the appeal of the book too. That it’s realistic and it sort of mimics life. So that the relationship between these two unfold in a way you feel like is authentic. Yeah, I mean, I’m having conversations with people on the phone. And so I asked the author about that aspect too. One of my pet peeves in books is if the dialog doesn’t sound realistic to me. So I am very interested in how people really speak. And if you’re gonna write about 20-somethings, you have to write about texting, you have write about DMs, you have about the way that they communicate, particularly obviously with people who haven’t seen each other, and only communicate through writing. And I, because they are people who care passionately. About books, about authors, about writing. They’re both in publishing. It takes on an even more important weight in the book, how they write, how that they speak in writing to each other. And so when the characters in this book are communicating via text message or app, you actually see that in the book with those little blocks. Oh wow. You know, so it’s realistic and like that. I like that It sounds like a nightmare for whoever’s laying out the book, but awesome for the reader, you know, to have that kind of realistic depiction of what’s going on. All right, so before I ask you about the big question, I want to go back to the lion for a bit, because I’m curious about the fate of that book. I mean, a lot of big name writers who die, that book’s going to see the light of day someday, simply because good or not, it’s part of the culture now, or that person is part of that culture, we need it to be able to study it. Well, it’s sort of like a what would you do moment, right? So take your favorite author and then you discover that your favorite author has written this terrible book. That’s just awful. Um, would you want it out there? Well, I kind of would because I guess because I’m used to seeing that kind of thing right now like like Even when I was a teenager like new Hemingway books were coming out I remember I was teenager when true at first light came out and it was not Like praised as the the hidden work of genius that had been sitting in his drawer But it was but it was a Heming way like we want to see what he wrote because he’s a major American writer now He was also problematic in his way. I don’t know because I didn’t read it, whether or not that particular book was problematic in the way that Hemingway was problematic, but still seems like it would be an important part of the culture. So I guess it’s why it’s important to know what the lion did, I guess. This this is the sort of the big question of the book, you know, how will the lion be presented and You know what happens in the end, you sort of takes into account everything that we’ve learned in the book the relationship between the lion and Rebecca’s mother and the widow and the son even even Ben and so I think The person that ends up, you now sort of scoring the deal with the lion’s widow is a surprise But so are some of the things that we learn about the widow and Rebecca’s mother, but in the end I think everybody has a happy ending There is romance. Okay, I will tell you that And I think it ends up very fair. It ends up. Very fair for the lion Because we have to know about these things that happen But it’s also fair to those people that the lion has hurt. I will say that as well. So I think that in a way acknowledges his greatness, but also his issues. And in the end, again, it’s not a spoiler at all to say that his work is going to get out there. It’s just a sort of what, work, and how. I think it’s a very satisfying end. Okay, so overall, what gives Hot Desk the narrative edge? So I picked up the book because it was sort of like a book about books, you know? I’m like a rom-com set in a publishing house. I kind of want to hear that. But I kept reading because it’s sort of several books at once, you’ve got this mystery of why is Rebecca in this position? What happened to her mother back then? And why is Ben in this situation? And what will become of them? As a couple, which of them will get the deal? And will the lion’s legacy be tarnished or not? In the end, I don’t think it is. I think it’s just explained a little bit more. And so, you know, I think its funny too. I really do. All these little snipping that they do at each other because it’s sort of a hot and cold relationship. And then the language. You know, these people are talking like 20-year-olds do. I find it funny the way 20- year-olds talk. That, that, me too, that means we’re old now. Yeah, that’s what that means. So, um. Six, seven. I don’t know what that mean. That’s a thing that kids say now. I don’t know why. Does that mean the I spent some I spent some time with my nieces recently and it’s six, seven, everything. Does that mean the podcast’s over? We’re gonna 86 this podcast. No, it means the transcript’s gonna be picked up in all sorts of Google searches now, I guess Okay, well, anyways, it’s a great book. I highly recommend it. You could think it starts out slow, but I liked it through and through. The romance part doesn’t happen until the end, but I like it through. Well, I haven’t read it, but I’m already inspired to passive aggressively move your desk furniture around. That’s great. We don’t we don’t. We don’t share a desk. I know I’m going to go out of. Don’t share your desk stuff around. Alright the book is Hot Desk by Laura Dickerman. Orlando thank you very much for telling me all about it. Thank you.
Two rival editors, one shared desk, and a mountain of Post-it notes. In Hot Desk by Georgia author Laura Dickerman, Rebecca Blume and Ben Heath wage a quiet war over workspace until a literary legend’s death turns their feud into a fight for career-defining glory.
On this episode of Narrative Edge, Peter Biello and Orlando Montoya review Dickerman’s witty look at rivalry, ambition, and love in the modern publishing world. #booktube #books #bookreview