Published by Harper on August 4, 2020
The largest law firms in the United States believe themselves to be stocked with the best lawyers. That attitude reflects arrogance rather than reality. Most lawyers in Big Law lack creativity and have little regard for justice. They help big businesses move money back and forth while returning scant value to society. None of that comes through in The Boy’s Club, a novel that is not so much an indictment of Big Law as an industry but of sexism in its upper echelons. There is merit in telling that story, but the pseudonymous Erica Katz doesn’t tell it effectively.
As a child, Alexandra (“Alex”) Vogel always did what she wanted to do. Her willfulness got her anything she desired. Her drive got her into a top law school and a job at Klasko, one of the top Big Law firms. Now she wants to make partner in Mergers & Acquisitions, the most competitive practice group in the firm. It’s also the group that generates the most revenue, allowing partners to make their own rules and to break the firm’s rules with impunity.
Alex spends most of her first year deciding whether she wants to “match” with a particular practice group. The group will then decide whether to accept her. Alex hopes to match with M&A, as does her best friend in the firm, Carmen. The M&A group, however, is a boy’s club that selects female first year associates based on how hot they are, not on their talent. (“Talent,” in this case, refers to a lawyer’s ability to attract and retain clients. The firm sees males as more likely to do so, since most of the business executives they deal with are males who bond with their lawyers over drinks at strip clubs.)
Alex has the usual life of a first year Big Law associate, meaning she has no life to speak of outside of work. She’s expected to bill every hour of every day. She is handsomely compensated for her efforts, but Sam, her live-in boyfriend, grows weary of never seeing her. Alex purports to love Sam but that doesn’t stop her from having an affair with the most successful M&A partner, Peter Dunn. Flattered by Dunn’s attention, Alex cheats on Sam while ignoring the likelihood that Dunn is probably sleeping with every woman who meets his standard of hotness.
There’s not much more to a plot that is fairly predictable. All the high-powered men behave atrociously toward women. Catty women talk about Alex behind her back, although it is easy to see why they think she is trying to sleep her way to the top. Gary Kaplan, the firm’s best client, assaults Alex and turns out to be a serial abuser of women. Kaplan relies on wealth and nondisclosure agreements to keep his victims from reporting his assaults. Klasko relies on settlements and nondisclosure agreements to keep female associates from suing for sexual harassment. Eventually Alex does something that she thinks might make the world a better place for women while knowing that the fight must continue.
Katz makes Kaplan over-the-top to make her point. News stories tell us about powerful men who sexually abuse women, but Kaplan actually flies women from Miami to New York and pays them to accept brutal beatings. The point could have been made without bludgeoning the reader with such unlikely evidence that Kaplan is a foul specimen of maleness.
Alex is a spectacularly unsympathetic character. Her primary complaint about life at her firm is not that her boss slept with her but that he didn't sleep with her (and his wife) exclusively. That's a complaint fueled by jealousy, not by sexual harassment. Alex feels sorry for herself when Sam gets tired of her inattention, a rather hypocritical reaction, given that she is cheating on him with a married man. She also feels sorry for herself when she learns that she’s not the only first year associate to be ill-treated at her firm, apparently because she’s too self-absorbed to take note of the firm’s culture. Her belated efforts to change that culture are too contrived to redeem her. Despite a bonding moment in another contrived scene with an associate who is about to kill herself, Alex’s love of money, shopping, and expensive wine clearly outweigh her concern about her co-workers (much less the female support staff, who are barely on her radar).
Promotional materials characterize The Boy’s Club as a novel about “sex and power” that has been optioned to Netflix, presumably because cheesy stories of sex and power have been a consistent television draw since the days of Dallas and Dynasty. I wouldn’t call The Boy’s Club cheesy, but the characters are shallow and the story holds no surprises. From a stylistic perspective, The Boy’s Club is well written. Still, this is a novel in which style triumphs over substance.
The Boy’s Club comes across as a “message” novel. It’s a good message, but only people who willfully ignore the news need to be awakened to the fact that powerful men often behave atrociously. So do powerful women (albeit in different ways). The prose quality and some interesting scenes kept me reading, but the predictable story and unpleasant protagonist kept me from enjoying the book from beginning to end.
RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS