This dark corporate satire will distract you from your own work woes
Stinkbug
Sinead Stubbins
Affirm Press, $34.99
Can wellness culture mix with the workplace? Don't the two produce a weird water and oil liquid that can't quite combine, no matter how cutting-edge the innovations? In her debut novel, Stinkbug, Sinéad Stubbins wittily highlights the many pitfalls of current trends, and in the process holds up a cracked mirror of horror as we recognise how corporate culture is invading individual privacy.
Edith is our anti-heroine. Swedish overlords are acquiring the marketing company where Edith – the worst kind of control freak who lives in habitual fear of the outstretched hands of her subordinates, her equals, and her superiors – has worked at for decades. All employees with jobs on the line are sent to a three-day luxury 'work retreat' in the Australian bush where a sip of a mind-altering elixir will replace toxic negativity with toxic positivity. So much oil, so much water.
The approach of the team leaders escalates from a familiar wellness doctrine to group exercises in consensual slapping that get way out of hand and are madly funny.
Edith's life is a shamble in every other respect, so she can't cope with her job being on the line as well. Then there's the fact that the retreat threatens to lay bare the very worst aspects of Edith. The crowning jewel of her self-destruction comes with the looming exposure of the secret that she had her (popular) former partner fired from the company.
Poor Edith is something of a monster of bad faith but her paranoia and sneakiness are intimately familiar; they're cartoon exaggerations of us all. All that deception, all those tangled webs. Stinkbug tickles the reader but then it starts to pinch; to squeeze and to claw at your fears.
What begins as workplace farce mutates into a corporate horror show as everyone's salaries are revealed and suddenly, chillingly, 'Edith's colleagues [move] towards her … speaking in low voices, coming closer, gnashing their teeth and snarling things that she couldn't catch.'
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