The Very Nice Box

The "very nice box" is just that. It is a box that has all the details that make it useful. The protagonist works for a big design company and his spent almost all of her time engineering the box. She obsesses over the details and has her specific order of doing things.

We learn that she had come back from tragedy. She was a passenger in a car with her parents and her soon-to-be-fiance girlfriend. They crashed in a hit and run and she was the only one to survive. She sometimes has flashbacks and has trouble moving on.

One day, her boss retires and a super positive buzz-wordy Wharton graduate comes in to take his place. While she has her own obsessions with millennial tech startup life, she cringes at all his corporate positivism. However, she eventually falls in love with him. There relationship is an open secret and he ends up getting pushed to another office in Ohio. Meanwhile, people are protesting the new tower that the company is building.

The guy is part of "good guys" which is an organization that encourages men to be positive - but seems more like an excuse to justify bad behavior in positivity. She later learns that the guy has been dishing her all sorts of lies and that he is in fact the drunk driver that hit her. They end up in the factory where he conveniently gets locked away in a very nice box.

I found my loyalties shifting back and forth. There was sympathy for the corporate types. Then sympathy for the protestors. Then sympathy for the "millennial tech marketing bros" then sympathy for the engineers. In the end, everyone had their own good and bad. Nothing was absolute. Even in relationships, the lesbian main character ends up in an intense relationship with a guy. People were doing lots of evil to each other, and justifying it with some "higher rationale". The novel is almost grounded in plausibility, but clearly takes a step "out there" to be surreal. I really liked it at first, but was disappointed with the the rapid shifts at the ending.