WORKHORSE, by Caroline Palmer
What you really want is for her to get away with it all. Clodagh “Clo” Harmon, the beautiful, brooding, self-sabotaging protagonist of Caroline Palmer’s debut novel, “Workhorse,” spends the book digging a deeper and deeper hole headed nowhere … but up? “No, Clo!” I groaned aloud multiple times. How does a magazine assistant get caught up in a million-dollar art heist, and that’s only a subplot?
My lips are sealed. But my hair smells like cigarettes, my breath like Grey Goose and my wrists like Baccarat Rouge from the beauty closet. We’re back in the print-media glory days, except instead of the expensed buzz from an Odeon martini, my stomach twisted with anxiety.
Clo has hustled her way into a desk at the most prestigious fashion magazine in the country with the goal of one day becoming an editor in chief. She has “whorish, manipulative inclinations,” and she’s willing to make it happen in ways no H.R. department would approve of. Who can afford to be ethical for $24,000 a year? (When I was an assistant at Vanity Fair, we used to sell coffee-table books sent to the office as a way to earn extra cash. Not sure I want to tell you the other ways.)
The actual editor in chief, though, is largely irrelevant to this story, a character that Palmer, who was once the editor of Vogue.com, strategically ignores. That one’s been done. I hesitate to even mention “The Devil Wears Prada”; that book and this one are only as related as passers-by sharing an elevator, and maybe a taste for salads dressed in lemon juice. “Workhorse” feels closer to, if less homicidal than, “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” another sinister story with a paranoid and untrustworthy antihero. Clo’s sample-sale Louboutins click on rain-splashed Midtown sidewalks. Trouble’s looming.
Palmer’s plot is less about publishing than it is about the struggle to climb social rank. At the magazine (which remains unnamed), there are the Workhorses like Clo, who come from middle-class families and have longed for this gig from afar: “Each page impressed upon me that, with enough hard work, an acne-busting yogurt mask and a better nighttime thigh routine, all things were possible, even for a suburban nothing like me.”
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