The Ex

As Cassie’s and Anna’s stories unfold in tandem, it becomes clear that they have much in common. Most obviously, both women are far less wealthy than Joel and his rich friends. As they struggle to stay afloat in the hyper-capitalist environment of New York City, they find that their choices are shaped and limited by the need for money.

When Joel breaks up with Anna (initially identified only as “the Ex”), the breakup has an immediate and profound impact on the material conditions of her life. She continues to depend on him to pay the rent on her apartment, preventing her from moving on and raising the stakes of her attempts to get him back. When he cuts off the rent payments, she is forced to move out of the spacious apartment she had shared with him and—after touring a 70-square-foot “micro-apartment”—leave Manhattan to move in with her grandmother in Brooklyn. In the later timeline, as Cassie is dating Joel, Anna is happily married to Dean and living an upper-middle-class life: For both her and Cassie, the stakes of success or failure in romance are economic as well as emotional.

Cassie’s struggling bookstore is evidence of another kind of economic inequality. Cassie is forced to take extreme measures to keep the store open in a changing economy, and the store’s debt has a tangible impact on her personal life. In the opening pages of the novel, Cassie expresses regret about “taking the reins of a used bookstore that was struggling in the setting of a growing online and electronic book sales market” (15). Even before she took over the store, Cassie’s grandparents Marv and Bea were forced to “to do things they weren’t proud of to keep the doors from closing” (42). Grandma Bea attempts to justify her husband’s decision to forge antique books by explaining that they “couldn’t make enough money” (339) with normal sales and “would have lost everything” (339) if they hadn’t resorted to illegal forgeries. Cassie continues the forgeries because she knows that “without that extra money, her business was gone” (339), and she can’t bear to “lose her grandparents’ store” (339). For both Cassie and her grandparents, resorting to illegal forgeries is a necessary step in keeping their struggling business afloat.

Throughout the novel, Cassie’s coworker Zoe offers legal but bizarre suggestions for keeping the business financially sound. At various points, she suggests that they install “a makeup counter” (45), “an erotica section” (158), and “a petting zoo” (253), and that they pivot to being a “bookstore and sandwich shop” (89). The increasing strangeness of these suggestions reflects her desperation to keep the store open and demonstrates the constant struggles of running a small business, especially in a city as economically competitive as New York.

Cassie’s struggles to keep Bookland open have a tangible effect on her personal life. She delays her first date with Joel because she “can’t afford to close early” (43), knowing that “she needs the money desperately if there’s any chance of the store not going under” (43). While on the date, Cassie is anxious about Joel’s choice of sushi because she knows “she can’t afford a sushi dinner. She can barely afford ramen noodles” (47). Later, when the store is vandalized, Cassie is forced to take slow and unreliable public transportation because she can’t afford to take a taxi with “the cost of getting the store cleaned up” (177). Cassie’s constant worries about the store’s finances impact her personal life, forcing her to risk arrest by forging rare books and imposing limits on her daily existence that wealthier characters like Joel, Dean, Pete, and Lydia never have to face.