Cecilia Rabess’ debut novel made waves before it was published: marketed as an enemies-to-lovers romance between a young black liberal and a white Republican, BookTok and Goodreads got riled up at the thought that racial inequality was being used as a love-across-the-divide hurdle.
The reality is rather more complex, and the idea that you should probably read a book before denouncing it holds fast. That said, Rabess is playing a sly and delicate game here – and for, ooh, at least the first half of Everything’s Fine I really wasn’t sure about it.
The novel is bookended by American elections. Jess and Josh meet at their Ivy League university on the night of Obama’s win; Jess tells a student newspaper reporter she’s “never felt more humbled or hopeful”, while Josh says he’s “not convinced it’s the right time to entrust another tax-and-spend liberal with the economy”. Could this be the least promising meet-cute ever?
A few years later, starting as an investment banking analyst at Goldman Sachs (somewhere Rabess has also worked), Jess discovers Josh is her mentor. Banter about affirmative action turns to lunch dates, turns to romance. He’s thoughtful and caring; he tells her continually how “pretty” and “clever” she is. But he also never really understands her lived reality a black woman.
It’s a long setup, and using race and politics as ingredients in an opposites-attract romance can feel uncomfortably glib. It also seems like Rabess made Jess an analyst simply to bring the characters together.
There’s something thorny in a perennially overlooked and underestimated black woman proving herself by taking on the cut-throat, masculine, white, bias-riddled world of finance (see also: Natasha Brown’s Assembly). But Jess seems to disdain this world, rather than being intoxicated by it or plotting to change it from within. She appears to hate capitalism – there are jokes about her being a Marxist! – and loathes the people she works for, yet she’s also determined to be “taken seriously” by them. She seems driven by the status and security money brings, but then doesn’t work for months when she loses a job. We’re all well-versed in messy, flawed heroines, but Jess is sometimes just confoundingly inconsistent.
Thankfully, Rabess eventually turns the screws, via the arrival of one Donald Trump. Jess takes a dream job at a lefty website – only affordable because she lives rent-free at Josh’s $4 million apartment. But when she finds a MAGA hat in the flat, simmering political differences between the couple boil over in a break-up row. Rabess provides a scorching list of everything that hat really represents: “systemic inequality, and the Ku Klux Klan, and plantation-wedding Pinterest boards, and lynchings, and George Zimmerman…” – a total of 29 lines, spelling out how America is racist.
When Jess calls Josh out, he calls her a hypocrite: “You don’t have a problem with the system, just your place in it”. The charge hits home, and Jess confronts her own complicity, as the “kind of person who buys eighteen-dollar jamon while writing her name under headlines like How Income Inequality is Destroying Society. The kind of person who wants a million dollars – an obscene sum of money – just to be seen”.
The writing is sharp here, slicing cleanly through Jess’s previous haziness, as she embarks on a journey to embrace her blackness and figure out how to live authentically. Until… she falls back in with Josh.
Can they overcome their differences? Is it really better to “be happy than to be right”? Rabess cleverly leaves readers in the same position as her characters, full of doubts about the possibility – and the morality – of love conquering all.
Everything’s Fine by Cecilia Rabess is published by Picador, £16.99. Holly Williams’s novel What Time is Love? is out in paperback now
