In Office Hours, which traces two office romances (focusing on the woman in each affair: one is Stella, a middle-aged high-level executive who falls for Rhys, a 27-year trainee, and the other is Bella, a 27-year old personal assistant/researcher and single mom who falls for her middle-aged boss, James) is compelling, funny, and also somewhat maddening. By “compelling” I mean it was a book I raced through in the course of a few days, happy to pick it up at any spare moment and reluctant to put it down: one morning when I got to work early, I nearly sloshed my tea over a co-worker as I was making my way, while reading, from the kitchen back to my desk. Even knowing (as you know from the start) that neither Stella’s nor Bella’s affair ends well, it’s hard not to get caught up in their passions as Kellaway flashes back to show the start and development of each entanglement. And when Kellaway’s lampooning the absurdity of the corporate world, she can be quite funny: at one point, one department of the oil company where all the protagonists work gets merged with another: the CEO sends out a message to the company that reads, in part, “This move is aligned with our strategy of streamlining our support operations to provide critical added value at the point of delivery”—snort (25). But at other times, the writing seemed really clunky to me: maybe this is due to Kellaway and her characters being British and British English being more formal, though I don’t know—I work for a company that’s headquartered in England and I think I’d notice if my British colleagues talked the way that Kellaway’s characters do. The dialogue was often stilted; the characters seemed hardly ever to use contractions, leading to passages like this:
The shit has really hit the fan with Stella. She has been in with Stephen and James all this time. I think they are drafting a statement, so I feel I needed to stay around. (315).
The start of the book was differently clunky, and made me exceedingly grumpy: the opening scene is of Stella at work, after her affair with Rhys has ended and she’s moved on to a new job. She’s checking her email, and she sees she has a message from him. OK, so far so good. Except the way Kellaway describes the mechanics of email-checking struck me as ridiculous and unrealistic: I understand that she perhaps has plot-driven reasons for describing things the way she does, but it’s a rough first few pages: you’re just meeting one of the protagonists, you’re not invested yet in the characters or the story, and there are these sentences that jolt, like:
With an unsteady hand she picked up the mouse, highlighted his name, and clicked delete.
“Are you sure you want to delete this message?” the computer asked.
But that was the problem: No, she wasn’t sure. (1)
Really? How often do you pick up your mouse (as opposed to just grabbing it)? Does your email client prompt you for confirmation of every message you delete (as opposed to bigger actions like emptying the trash)? Right. A few pages later there’s this: “She took the mouse, moved it to the message, and clicked on it to open” (3). What’s up with the play-by-play? I can almost read this sentence as an expression of how Stella, is feeling: maybe everything’s a bit slowed-down and she’s hyper-aware of every action she takes; the moment, maybe, feels momentous to her, an exciting/frightening moment on the edge of a decision. But mostly it just feels to me like too much detail not serving a purpose, just filling the space. There are similar passages later, too: at one point Bella sends an email by mistake, walks away from her desk, and then comes back and realizes she’s sent it because the screen says “Message sent to James Staunton”: really? “Message sent,” maybe, but with the name and everything? In a supposedly realistic novel, I shouldn’t be having to suspend my disbelief over the workings of computers.
More philosophically, the other thing that sometimes bothered me about this book was part of the central circumstances and premises: as Litlove puts it in her post on this book, “Kellaway buys into the ideology that affairs are punishments in themselves; the pleasure that Stella and Bella gain is far outweighed by the grief and stress of illicit relationships.” Yes, that. And the basically heterosexual/basically monogamous framework was sometimes an issue for me: you get the sense that the affairs would be doomed even without the issues of office impropriety and the threat of discovery, because the non-married parties want their married lovers to leave their spouses, to choose them instead, and even at the end of the book everyone’s concern, basically, is still with settling down into a partnership in one way or another: there’s no sense of there being any other alternative.
Leave a Reply