WORKHORSE

A young woman climbs up the editorial ladder at a top-tier fashion magazine.

Clodagh Harmon knows her position as a new editorial assistant to the arts and culture editor at an unnamed magazine is precarious. For this middle-class suburban Philadelphian to succeed, she’ll need to be “the right kind of girl,” anticipating her boss’ every whim, showing up early, staying late, and enduring humiliations like having her sophisticated colleague Davis Lawrence take her shopping for the right kind of coat and boots. After Davis, daughter of fading actor Barbara Lawrence, has a strange accident and convalesces at her mother’s Upper East Side apartment, Clo becomes her liaison with the office, gaining a bit of luster with higher-ups and currying favor with Barbara Lawrence. Author Palmer (who was once editor of Vogue.com) employs the phrase “at this moment in time” to locate her tale in the early aughts, when paper publishing still ruled; in one sense, her novel covers the demise of print even as it documents Clo’s rise through its ranks. “Around these halls, we employ only two types of people: the privileged (Workhorses) and the super-privileged (Show Horses),” Clo explains, alerting us to her deep hunger to belong. Between Davis, their journalist friend Harry, and encounters with power players like publisher Mark Angelbeck, Clo finds her place, but at a cost. Betting on the wrong horse can be expensive, she finds, even more than the various jewels, handbags, and gowns she gets from the publication’s closets. Her first-person perspective, claustrophobic as a set of blinders, is as effective—as long as those blinders don’t cause her to miss a competitor coming up from the rear. Darker than some famous predecessors, Palmer’s novel teases out class issues behind the doors of elite Manhattan media.

Tense, propulsive, and authentic.