RETURNS AND EXCHANGES

A successful Southeast retail chain contends with two different destabilizing forces.

The novel begins during the 1979 holiday season at the Lexington, Kentucky, branch of discount retailer Baker-Taylor’s, where Fran Taylor—as a female chief executive, she’s a rarity—ruminates over her good fortune: “Poor, to middling, to downright upper-middle class, judging by their ’78 tax returns, and all within twenty years.” Sharing the glory as well as the CEO title is Fran’s husband, Fred, who, after all this time—they’ve known each other since they were teenagers—still isn’t “at the point where he could see the red of her hair from across the room without feeling a shiver within.” Fran isn’t looking to further complicate her life—in addition to running the business, she and Fred are raising four kids—when she finds herself attracted to Wendy Patterson, one of the stores’ assistant managers. It isn't lost on Fran that if she acts on her desire, she could lose everything. The novel spans a decade in the lives of the six Taylors, each of whom is hard-bitten and bruised in some combination, and each of whom takes a turn with the book’s point of view. Whitaker has written a sprawling, extravagantly intelligent novel about people quietly breaking free from constraints—marital, gender, class. Here, as in her widely admired debut novel, The Animators (2017), she's attuned to working people’s lives and to the idea that professional ambition may be the purest reflection of character. The novel plays out against a distinctly American landscape in which Wendy’s encroachment on the Taylor marriage syncs up with the encroachment of a Walmart-like chain that people on the Baker-Taylor’s team refer to as “the Beast.” Not for nothing is this book’s epigraph a Sam Walton quote.

Superb. Like a blue-collar Franzen novel.