I just finished Kashana Cauley's The Playback and recommend it highly as a serious, sobering, and funny romp through a fictional (perhaps near) future in which the public is so indifferent to heavy-handed enforcement against people behind on student loans that three college-educated retail workers take matter into their own hands and plan revenge.
All three Black women were first-generation college students who believed the recruiters and financial aid counselors that going deeply into debt for college was their ticket to limitless futures. The lives of all three were thrown off course by bad luck and bad choices that would be mere speed bumps for others. None have any hope of ever getting out of debt. They now work together in clothing store in a mall, trapped and exploited in low-wage work, mistrustful of even one another.
And as they fall further behind on their payments while struggling to pay the rent, they are stalked by the private "Debt Police" who roam freely in public and private spaces to casually beat people as they chat with one other about absurd self-help routines. No one ever intervenes. With nothing left to lose, the three women plot together about how they'll take a run at their own liberation.
The New York Times reviewer writes:
It’s a student loan heist story. A tale of revenge, cheap tequila, a hand-sewn Catwoman suit and the mall, with debt and despair simmering in the background.
As that despair intensifies, Jada, the narrator, articulates in a single paragraph what dozens of policy documents have tried to explain across pages:
“First, we screwed up by not coming from money. Then we demanded the same education as everyone else. But when we finished our studies, they paid us the least, leaving us with higher balances to carry forward. Forever.”
Yet the book is funny. As Jada drives toward hope for a future of her own making in her decrepit white Honda Civic (no one would ever notice a parked white Honda Civic as the driver does surveillance), Cauley invites us to laugh at the absurdity of a social system in which the only actors benefitting from the educational aspirations of poor young people are the companies lending them tuition money.
Cauley invites is to laugh with these women who have the audacity to fight back.
It's a fun, serious, and quick read as we transition back to the academic year.
