The Golden Chance, JAK
Jul. 13th, 2023 10:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
walkitoutThis 1990 then-contemporary romance by JAK is out as an e-book.
So many things to think about! SPOILER altho honestly, this book is now old enough that it reads like a historical, rather than a contemporary, which is something I deeply love about JAK’s earlier work.
While a good chunk of the book takes place in fictional Holloway, east of the mountains, and Port Claxton, somewhere on the Washington coast, and even on Bainbridge Island, there are a few brief segments set in Seattle. The Castleton Lightfoot company seems to be located in South Lake Union, and Nicodemus Lightfoot visits that company on a few occasions — he sneaks into town when he’s trying to figure out what his ex-wife and now stepmother and CEO of his family’s company his up to. He’s heard rumors that it might be sold to Traynor, a competitor known for bleeding companies dry and then dumping them, and doesn’t want her to know that he’s onto what she is up to until he can prove it.
That’s a lot, right!?! Ex-wife AND stepmother!?! But in this case, she convinced Nick’s dad to marry her because she was supposedly pregnant with Nick’s baby and he was divorcing her, which adds a whole new layer of WTFery to this family dynamic. But if you are thinking I’ve seen a lot of these themes in later JAK work — not all at once mind you, as they are here — you are not wrong (no grotto scene, tho!).
The other half of our proto-couple, Philadelphia Fox — I will never Not Love the names in JAK novels — had idealistic parents who died when she was young (yep — that’s shown up in later novels!), was raised by a grandmother, who then died when she was a young teenager and went into foster care. In foster care, she was attacked by the brother of a foster father, and rescued by foster sister Crissie Masters. Crissie
HEY I MENTIONED SPOILERS
Turns out to be the daughter of Burke Castleton. Crissie tracks down her dad, makes some trouble for the Castleton Lightfoots, dies in a curvy mountain road in a single car accident (_again_ _we_ _have_ _seen_ _this_!) and leaves the shares that the recently deceased Burke left her, to Philadelphia Fox.
So Nick goes to track down Phila at the behest of Burke’s widow to try to get the shares back in the families. He’s got his own reasons for doing so (fight for control of family company at the annual meeting!), but once he meets Phila, his agenda acquires a new and more urgent element. Phila grew up, became a social worker and engaged in some shenanigans to bust an abuser. He’s in prison, but he and his wife are an ongoing threat to Phila, and she’s really struggling to live with what she did to get the abuser put in prison and the foster kids in his care placed in safer homes. She decides she should better understand what happened with Castletons, Lightfoots and Crissie Masters in the months leading up to Crissie’s death.
Obviously, and more plausibly here than in many later JAK works which have elements of this but not the entire, wacky cocktail, this is a set up for Philadelphia Fox to excavate all the skeletons in the Castleton Lightfoot families’ closets. Darren Castleton is planning on running to become a Republican governor (look, in 1990 Washington State that was not a wildly implausible thing) with the support of his wife Victoria, but their politics are not the far-right of 1990 much less what one associates with the Republican Party of our era. Victoria is a mom, and she cares about moms and kids, and towards the end of the book, part of the family therapy/surgery that Phila commits is connecting activists working for day care for homeless families up to the Castleton campaign for governor.
In a move JAK readers will recognize, Phila returns the shares Crissie left her, not to Nick, but to Darren (as they were Castleton shares originally). By this point, she’s lanced the boil that is Eleanor (who has a greenhouse full of carnivorous plans!!! When she used to grow orchids. And she’s been in love with Reed Lightfoot for decades. I mean, so much of this reappears on Harmony), got Darren and Victoria talking again, convinced Reed and Nick to discuss things, figured out that Hilary is a lesbian and that she was Crissie’s lover, shared that information with Nick to help him over how flummoxed he was about his marriage to her, and generally lined everyone up to vote to put Nick back in as CEO and oust Hilary.
So, I obviously have some huge issues here. We have a dead girl driving the story, and she’s lesbian. We have a Very Bad Woman Trying to Get Revenge on the Families Company, and she’s lesbian. I mean. This is not particularly okay as a plot structure. On the other hand, both Crissie and Hilary are depicted extremely sympathetically, and Philadelphia feels tremendous loyalty and love and loss towards Crissie, understands Hilary and her motivations and by the end of the book is trying to convince Nick to turn the consulting operation he started over to Hilary since he’ll have his hands full with the Littlefoot Castleton company. Sympathetic gay couples have been in the background of JAK novels which are available as e-books and which date from roughly the same time frame. I think it’s pretty clear that this one was a little later to become an e-book because while it does have a sympathetic portrayal of lesbian characters, it’s also pretty depressing.
I really enjoyed reading this, partly because there is a quite detailed description of driving through the city from the airport to a condo in Pike Place Market. It is the most early 1990s thing ever, right down to a later conversation about that condo between Nick and Phila in which Phila has some Questions about what was there before it was torn down and the condo was built and Nick reassures her it was an old warehouse. The issues with Pike Place run way deeper than that particular round of gentrification, but that conversation wasn’t part of public discourse at that point in time.
As occurs throughout JAK’s work, we have a man trying to save a family concern that he walked away from years earlier to build a new firm on his own. Sometimes, he starts out trying to destroy it; sometimes, as here, he is trying to thwart another person’s revenge. Sometimes, he is just trying to reverse an extended period of mismanagement by someone else in the family. Sometimes, it’s not his company, but a company associated with the woman. Sometimes, he’s trying to figure out who in the company — often a trusted partner — is committing crimes within the company. In any event, while sometimes that company is extractive industry associated or something similar, most often the company is in or adjacent to an electronics company, often, as here, contracting to the government. In this book, the founding generation did not want to pivot from supplying the government to participating in the larger market of consumer electronics, so Nick goes off to start a consulting firm advising companies that want to open branches in other Pacific Rim countries — another major theme in JAK books.
I’m really happy to see this book available again, this time as an e-book. The treatment of lesbians within the book is deeply problematic from one perspective, but perfectly captures the intersection of Women Treating Marriage and Producing a Child as a Job vs. Women Finding Life Satisfaction In Work and Love. On the one hand, the death of Crissie, and the villain status of Hilary punishes lesbians. On the other hand, Philadelphia’s understanding and nudging of everyone towards acceptance and integration without putting impossible demands on lesbians was, in the 1990s, if not revolutionary, at least on the good side of things in a genre that wasn’t known for being so at the time and with a partisan political backdrop that made what she was doing feel pretty brave. I’d be pretty unhappy with someone writing this _now_, as a historical, because it so relentlessly centers heterosexuality. But I’m pretty happy with it being available as a once-contemporary-turned-historical as an opportunity to contemplate the changes I’ve seen happen in my lifetime.
I’m reasonably certain that I have read this book in paper some time in the distant past. Like, probably less than a decade after it came out. But it’s been too long for any of the details to stick, so having it back is fantastic for me personally, because it helps me trace the earlier (earliest?) appearance of so many details, themes and set pieces of JAK’s later work.
So many things to think about! SPOILER altho honestly, this book is now old enough that it reads like a historical, rather than a contemporary, which is something I deeply love about JAK’s earlier work.
While a good chunk of the book takes place in fictional Holloway, east of the mountains, and Port Claxton, somewhere on the Washington coast, and even on Bainbridge Island, there are a few brief segments set in Seattle. The Castleton Lightfoot company seems to be located in South Lake Union, and Nicodemus Lightfoot visits that company on a few occasions — he sneaks into town when he’s trying to figure out what his ex-wife and now stepmother and CEO of his family’s company his up to. He’s heard rumors that it might be sold to Traynor, a competitor known for bleeding companies dry and then dumping them, and doesn’t want her to know that he’s onto what she is up to until he can prove it.
That’s a lot, right!?! Ex-wife AND stepmother!?! But in this case, she convinced Nick’s dad to marry her because she was supposedly pregnant with Nick’s baby and he was divorcing her, which adds a whole new layer of WTFery to this family dynamic. But if you are thinking I’ve seen a lot of these themes in later JAK work — not all at once mind you, as they are here — you are not wrong (no grotto scene, tho!).
The other half of our proto-couple, Philadelphia Fox — I will never Not Love the names in JAK novels — had idealistic parents who died when she was young (yep — that’s shown up in later novels!), was raised by a grandmother, who then died when she was a young teenager and went into foster care. In foster care, she was attacked by the brother of a foster father, and rescued by foster sister Crissie Masters. Crissie
HEY I MENTIONED SPOILERS
Turns out to be the daughter of Burke Castleton. Crissie tracks down her dad, makes some trouble for the Castleton Lightfoots, dies in a curvy mountain road in a single car accident (_again_ _we_ _have_ _seen_ _this_!) and leaves the shares that the recently deceased Burke left her, to Philadelphia Fox.
So Nick goes to track down Phila at the behest of Burke’s widow to try to get the shares back in the families. He’s got his own reasons for doing so (fight for control of family company at the annual meeting!), but once he meets Phila, his agenda acquires a new and more urgent element. Phila grew up, became a social worker and engaged in some shenanigans to bust an abuser. He’s in prison, but he and his wife are an ongoing threat to Phila, and she’s really struggling to live with what she did to get the abuser put in prison and the foster kids in his care placed in safer homes. She decides she should better understand what happened with Castletons, Lightfoots and Crissie Masters in the months leading up to Crissie’s death.
Obviously, and more plausibly here than in many later JAK works which have elements of this but not the entire, wacky cocktail, this is a set up for Philadelphia Fox to excavate all the skeletons in the Castleton Lightfoot families’ closets. Darren Castleton is planning on running to become a Republican governor (look, in 1990 Washington State that was not a wildly implausible thing) with the support of his wife Victoria, but their politics are not the far-right of 1990 much less what one associates with the Republican Party of our era. Victoria is a mom, and she cares about moms and kids, and towards the end of the book, part of the family therapy/surgery that Phila commits is connecting activists working for day care for homeless families up to the Castleton campaign for governor.
In a move JAK readers will recognize, Phila returns the shares Crissie left her, not to Nick, but to Darren (as they were Castleton shares originally). By this point, she’s lanced the boil that is Eleanor (who has a greenhouse full of carnivorous plans!!! When she used to grow orchids. And she’s been in love with Reed Lightfoot for decades. I mean, so much of this reappears on Harmony), got Darren and Victoria talking again, convinced Reed and Nick to discuss things, figured out that Hilary is a lesbian and that she was Crissie’s lover, shared that information with Nick to help him over how flummoxed he was about his marriage to her, and generally lined everyone up to vote to put Nick back in as CEO and oust Hilary.
So, I obviously have some huge issues here. We have a dead girl driving the story, and she’s lesbian. We have a Very Bad Woman Trying to Get Revenge on the Families Company, and she’s lesbian. I mean. This is not particularly okay as a plot structure. On the other hand, both Crissie and Hilary are depicted extremely sympathetically, and Philadelphia feels tremendous loyalty and love and loss towards Crissie, understands Hilary and her motivations and by the end of the book is trying to convince Nick to turn the consulting operation he started over to Hilary since he’ll have his hands full with the Littlefoot Castleton company. Sympathetic gay couples have been in the background of JAK novels which are available as e-books and which date from roughly the same time frame. I think it’s pretty clear that this one was a little later to become an e-book because while it does have a sympathetic portrayal of lesbian characters, it’s also pretty depressing.
I really enjoyed reading this, partly because there is a quite detailed description of driving through the city from the airport to a condo in Pike Place Market. It is the most early 1990s thing ever, right down to a later conversation about that condo between Nick and Phila in which Phila has some Questions about what was there before it was torn down and the condo was built and Nick reassures her it was an old warehouse. The issues with Pike Place run way deeper than that particular round of gentrification, but that conversation wasn’t part of public discourse at that point in time.
As occurs throughout JAK’s work, we have a man trying to save a family concern that he walked away from years earlier to build a new firm on his own. Sometimes, he starts out trying to destroy it; sometimes, as here, he is trying to thwart another person’s revenge. Sometimes, he is just trying to reverse an extended period of mismanagement by someone else in the family. Sometimes, it’s not his company, but a company associated with the woman. Sometimes, he’s trying to figure out who in the company — often a trusted partner — is committing crimes within the company. In any event, while sometimes that company is extractive industry associated or something similar, most often the company is in or adjacent to an electronics company, often, as here, contracting to the government. In this book, the founding generation did not want to pivot from supplying the government to participating in the larger market of consumer electronics, so Nick goes off to start a consulting firm advising companies that want to open branches in other Pacific Rim countries — another major theme in JAK books.
I’m really happy to see this book available again, this time as an e-book. The treatment of lesbians within the book is deeply problematic from one perspective, but perfectly captures the intersection of Women Treating Marriage and Producing a Child as a Job vs. Women Finding Life Satisfaction In Work and Love. On the one hand, the death of Crissie, and the villain status of Hilary punishes lesbians. On the other hand, Philadelphia’s understanding and nudging of everyone towards acceptance and integration without putting impossible demands on lesbians was, in the 1990s, if not revolutionary, at least on the good side of things in a genre that wasn’t known for being so at the time and with a partisan political backdrop that made what she was doing feel pretty brave. I’d be pretty unhappy with someone writing this _now_, as a historical, because it so relentlessly centers heterosexuality. But I’m pretty happy with it being available as a once-contemporary-turned-historical as an opportunity to contemplate the changes I’ve seen happen in my lifetime.
I’m reasonably certain that I have read this book in paper some time in the distant past. Like, probably less than a decade after it came out. But it’s been too long for any of the details to stick, so having it back is fantastic for me personally, because it helps me trace the earlier (earliest?) appearance of so many details, themes and set pieces of JAK’s later work.