JADED, by Ela Lee
In the middle of Ela Lee’s smart, compulsively readable debut novel, “Jaded,” a human resources employee assures a young lawyer named Jade: “As you know, we take all allegations of sexual misconduct very seriously.” They’re familiar words, but what do they mean in practice? Has the #MeToo movement changed anything? “Jaded” explores one millennial’s experience as she finds out the hard way.
Jade is living the dream. She’s the only child of a Korean mother and an Anatolian father, and she has secured a job at the big London law firm Reuben, Fleisher & Wishall LLP. But when she wakes up after a work party hung over, naked, bruised and bleeding, her life is shattered. Gradually, Jade remembers snippets of the night: She was encouraged to drink by a predatory partner at her firm; a co-worker saw that she was in trouble and escorted her home; she let him into her apartment, blacked out, and then this supposedly good Samaritan raped her.
After the assault, Jade tries to keep moving, working feverishly although she suffers from nightmares. But the people around her, like her friend Adele, notice something is amiss. And as Jade tries to disappear into her work, her handsome, white, privileged boyfriend, Kit, complains, “It’s getting really rubbish not seeing you for a fortnight at a time.” But Jade keeps slogging, telling herself, “It’s fine, it’s fine, it’s fine.”
The book balances the heavy subject of rape with a darkly funny treatment of work culture. Jade’s firm is a place where “dining al desko was in vogue.” Drafted for the diversity committee, Jade endures meetings where she and her colleagues “go around the room and think about how we are personally complicit in upholding oppressive structures.”
However, when Jade begins to face what happened to her, the novel deepens. Cant about oppressive structures no longer seems absurd. The corporate hope “that you feel the office is a safe environment” rings hollow. By the same token, when Jade tells Kit what she has been grappling with, the tenor of their relationship changes. Perhaps the finest exchanges in this book are those in which Jade and Kit discuss the night she can’t remember. Kit’s response to Jade’s ordeal is a masterpiece of mixed emotions. He is at once confused (“I don’t know what to say”), jealous (“The idea of him being … intimate with you…”), sympathetic (“I want to be there for you”) and self-pitying (“I don’t know why you didn’t feel you could tell me”).
Will justice be served? And how much will Jade risk in its pursuit? These questions drive the plot, but it’s the characters who make us care. Lee develops Jade’s parents with specificity and tenderness. Her Baba in the “gray-blue fleece” he wears “daily from September to March,” her Omma serving kimchi-chigae. Jade fears that explaining what happened, and admitting that she might need to leave the firm, would devastate her mother and father, immigrants who struggled for years to provide for their only child.
The misogyny at Jade’s law firm is pervasive and soul-sucking. Among the “invisible rules” for women at social events, Jade notes, is the directive that you should “be seductive, but don’t actually seduce anyone.” The stated decree at the firm is that there is a “zero-tolerance policy on any behavior that is sexually inappropriate.” But, as Jade learns, theory and practice diverge. Beneath that rule is a deeper one: If anything happens to you, you should suck it up or leave. There is a big divide between the letter and the spirit of the law. “Mind the gap,” the London tube caution goes. That also seems to be the project of Lee’s book — minding the gap between talk about versus the reality of sexual misconduct. With “Jaded,” Lee shows how treacherous that distance can be.
JADED | By Ela Lee | Simon & Schuster | 372 pp. | $27.99
