[REVIEW] Deathbed Dimes, by Naomi Elana Zener

294 pages, $19.99

Review by Jody Hobbs Hesler

Have you ever been a token at your workplace? The only woman? The only Jew / Asian / Hispanic / African-American? What if you are two of these things – a powerhouse of a double-token for your firm? And what if you are good at your job, but the junior colleague whose dead weight you always have to carry winds up being promoted ahead of you? Welcome to Joely Zeller’s world, as wrought in Naomi Elana Zener’s debut novel, Deathbed Dimes, and watch what she does – Stanford Law School grad, Jewish woman double-token for her New York City law firm – when her ignoramus of a junior associate becomes partner instead of her.

For Joely, this horrible workday happens the morning after her fiancé ditches her, having realized late in the game that he is gay. His self-discovery is so beyond Joely’s expectations that when she comes home to an eerily empty apartment, her first reaction is, “Obviously Yan had been abducted.”

If the broken heart comes as a sucker-punch, then the ruptured career track is a full-body slam. Burning bridges with her resignation letter, Joely speaks freely: “As of this letter, your ethnic quota is short one token Jewish woman…[I] have spent the last four of my eight years cleaning up after an imbecilic child whose legal education required no measure of intelligence to receive.” With that, Joely packs her office and takes the earliest possible flight back to her childhood home of Los Angeles, with no plan but to flee the disaster her life has suddenly become.

The story that follows blends spitefulness, antic behavior, juicy gossip, and ceaseless sarcasm into a guilty pleasure of a workplace payback fantasy. Joely cobbles together a law firm of her own in L.A., enlisting her best buddies from her high-powered law school days. Meanwhile, she crashes with her father and self-described “screen siren” of a mother, in her pick of the tricked-out outbuildings of her parents’ sprawling Hollywood estate. There she licks her wounds, re-tools her career, and prepares for revenge.

With a Hollywood megastar for a mother and D-movie director for a father, Joely “grew up in a world of glamour and Xanax … of superficialty to the extreme.” Her friend/colleagues spring from rather privileged backgrounds, too – except for Javier, whom Joely rescues from bussing tables after green card issues make him a hiring pariah for other law firms. (According to Javier, “The subtext was that I was too Hispanic for those toast bread firms.”) The firm Joely and her friends found combines all their talents, including her skills as an Estates and Trusts attorney, and Joely’s super-famous mother and potentially mentally incompetent father help generate some of their early roster of clients.

Leaping out on one’s own and setting up a law firm in Los Angeles might be an epic challenge for most people, but for this set, the safety net is gilded. If they lose everything, they’ll just get it all replaced the next day by Gucci Home Delivery. In fact, their first client arrives by serendipity – winding up as Joely’s seatmate on her flight from New York City: “Esty was the long lost niece of Ivana Iretzski, the dead woman at the heart of my former firm’s new estate case. She was the heiress no one could locate.” This heiress stands to gain a billion dollar inheritance if Joely’s former firm fails at its attempts to represent “Mandy ‘Morphine Queen’ Chalmers” in her efforts to invalidate the will that names Esty as beneficiary. So Esty is a jackpot of a first client and a perfect vehicle for Joely avenging the injustices of her former firm.

Perhaps this perfect, low-risk set-up stretches the bounds of credulity, and perhaps Joely’s sarcasm spares no one but herself. But the point of the story isn’t to create empathy but to exact vengeance. If you’ve ever felt like a workplace token or you’ve been relegated to get the coffee when you should be calling the shots, Joely’s vindictiveness and dramatic escapades will probably ring familiar, and her successes will satisfy.

***

Jody Hobbs Hesler lives and writes in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Her fiction, book reviews, feature articles, and essays appear or are forthcoming in As It Ought to Be’s At the Margins Review Series, [PANK], Steel Toe Review, Valparaiso Fiction Review, Prime Number, Pearl, Charlottesville Family Magazine, A Short Ride: Remembering Barry Hannah, and more. You can follow her at jodyhobbshesler.com or on her Facebook writer page: Jody Hobbs Hesler – Writer.