Don't Step Into My Office, by David Fishkind
I guess I only have one question to ask of David Fishkind’s debut novel, Don’t Step Into My Office: Who is this for, exactly?
I’ll be the first one to argue that art doesn’t need to be made for an audience. It can and should simply be an expression of the self, a buildup of tension within one’s being to be channeled into an earthly medium. The point is the catharsis of release; any observation and even appreciation of the art by others is gravy.
To that end, more power to Mr. Fishkind. But someone decided that his art should be published and copies sold for money, and I want to have words with that person and their whole chain of authority. I want to ask them Who? Who is the target audience to observe it and feel a transformative emotion, or inhabit a new perspective, or gain some understanding of the universe? Who found this book so remarkable that they advocated for it despite the glut of “novels of male ennui” autometafictively despaired over? (Who had and was willing to use up a favor with Junot Díaz to get a blurb?)
The fact is that Don’t Step is not good art. It has paper-thin characters and a ridiculous plot. It rewards bad people for doing bad things. It is hypocritical, selfish, and–worst of all–bourgeois. And frustratingly, oh-so-frustratingly, it never reckons with its lack of self-awareness.
What is it even about? Well, our protagonist, David Fishkind–er, Jacob Garlicker–is en route to his father-in-law's birthday weekend in some wealthy corner of Long Island. He is weighed down with the recent and abrupt disappearance of his parents, but with the aid of huge macrodoses of weed every half hour, decides to put on a nice face at the country club for his perfect Aryan wife Emma's benefit. At one of the parties, Garlicker stumbles across a crime in progress that echoes a trauma-inducing scene he accidentally witnessed ten years ago. So kicks off a zany mystery puzzle, and Garlicker finds himself driven by destiny to connect all the dots into a multi-generational, decade-crossing, and wildly coincidental karmic web. Of course, these dots are strewn through a drug-hazed, indistinct blur as Garlicker performs pinball ricochets all over New York through the past and present.
Garlicker, in addition to having in-laws from Long Island (who also own a townhouse in Greenwich Village), is himself the child of an upper middle class family. In what might be a maladaptive response, he has an unexamined obsession with name brands which compels him to both seek out people wearing luxury Cape Cod couture and also announce any designer pieces he spots, unasked. Unfortunately, he has learned through his expensive liberal arts education at NYU that being bourgeois is bad, a terrible blow to his Real Housewives heart.
To hide his passion for fashion, he cosplays poverty and homelessness, rejecting bourgeois “jobs” in favor of long stretches of unemployment where he can get blackout drunk and high on every drug under the sun. He won’t eat during these times, not because he can’t get lunch money from his parents (who are more than happy to pay for extensive medical care when he gets into a pickle) but just because–you know, starving artist vibes.
This lifestyle helps Garlicker fit into his social circle, full of prototypical gritty arts kids from the hard-knock streets of New York City. He is a failed writer with no job, so his favorite (only?) activity is hanging out at his friends' galleries and dive bars and uninsulated warehouse apartments to drink and do drugs. He hates their art, though, and doesn’t like music, so they have only a few things in common: addiction, vapidity, and misogyny. (Alexander got “canceled for saying rude things about women on the internet,” and Miriam’s appearances generally involve her giggling while being slapped and stepped on.)
Sometimes Garlicker will do a blue-collar gig for a few months so he can tell other people he’s a laborer who aspires to be a novelist. (So romantic! So Marxist!) Some other times he’ll quit his job and live in a tent while waiting for his expensive New England wedding reception. He openly admits to being more than welcome to continue living with his parents or in-laws during these times, but he demurs; looking at his privilege in the eye is “getting old.” And sometimes he’ll collect unemployment benefits to finance his vices, because hey, why leech from your parents when you can leech from society at large to pay for rideshares and whiskey, weed, and ketamine delivery?
In an attempt to balance the deep worthlessness of Garlicker’s life, Fishkind gives him depression. Unfortunately, it is almost completely drug- and addiction-induced. Fishkind erects a few scarecrow "friends" to immediately kill off in order to give some emotional heft to Garlicker's depression, and they are, unsurprisingly, also victim to drug overdoses. (One of them, weirdly, is both the only noted trans person and also the only noted person of color in the book.) When Garlicker takes up sobriety (except for weed, of course) and therapy, his suicidal depression quickly dissipates. But Sober Jacob isn’t very fun, so he jumps off the wagon almost as soon as the story starts. As I’m writing this, there really isn’t very much going on in the book except drugs and vanity, is there?
What’s truly off-putting is how Garlicker gets constantly, consistently, richly rewarded for just being his shitty self. His kleptomania goes unnoticed and lands him frequent, opportune scores. His bumbling interactions with strangers gets him information and free access to restricted areas. His no-contact multiple-day benders involving every drug on the black market are quickly and easily forgiven–and indeed only get his wife to love him more.
Yes, he gets the girl, and his family back, and the mystery solved, and the book deal, and, and, and. Anyone can do the same! Just be yourself, as they often say, as long as you are a young educated cishet white liberal upper-middle-class man in New England with every form of privilege known to society, as they often add.
Speaking of the girl, and indeed all the women characters, it would be a kindness to call them one-dimensional. None of them are individual beings; they exist solely to serve Jacob Garlicker and help him grow. They have only the simulacra of individual personalities and motivations, and aren’t even original characterizations.
Fishkind is a close adherent of the tropey system of “maiden, mother, crone.” Emma and Sofia are sex dolls differentiated only by their hair color, which conveniently matches their moral alignment. Alice and Gladys are ancient creatures at whom Fishkind has dug up every derogatory vulgarism for “old woman” in Roget’s to fling. And everyone else sums up to…Garlicker’s and Emma’s mothers. (The lesser characters of Miriam and Lauren Smith are a third kind of sex doll that exists only to get beaten up.)
At least there are women in the story. One of them even gets the distinction of the James Bond villain monologue! There is something missing entirely from Don’t Step: the acknowledgement of absolutely any Black people. Sure, any number of secondary characters might arguably be Black, but something quite strange comes into focus when considering how Fishkind’s use of his Jewish identity as spear and shield is extremely purposefully exclusive of Black people and history.
When Garlicker first arrives at the country club, he points out–with merit–that Jews had only been allowed as guests until “the last quarter of the previous century.” He does not mention that Black people were outright segregated from white-only clubs up until the 1990s. Fishkind raises this point in the context of his Jewish Gatsby theory, which he discusses in detail with references to white supremacy and the KKK…but with the complete conflation of non-whites and slaves with Jews, not mentioning Black people a single time!
We already know that Garlicker loves to perform, so it hardly surprises when he announces with glee that he “protested the cops” as some fun summer activity without any reference to the racially-motivated killings that spurred said protests. Afterwards, he and Emma drive out to Long Island to “cool off,” then to their Rhode Island family condo. It feels just a little weird to cleave meaning from those protests and follow up with New England road tripping at a time when the BLM movement was centering the stories of people who could not imagine living such flippant lives.
The most unbelievable example is when Fishkind says, “Semitic men had been paying penance on behalf of the atrocities their whiter, weightier counterparts carried out for millennia, and would continue perpetrating after the dust had settled.” Frankly, this is so weird that I don’t even know how to begin engaging with this. I leave it here as an exercise for someone with more patience and less incredulity to decipher.
What’s a nice thing I can say about Don’t Step? Well, I think this would be a jaw-dropping, venom-dripping, scene-shattering, singularly incisive satire if it ever just gave so much as a whisper of a shadow of a hint that it wasn’t serious. But somehow, every shred of evidence points to the contrary (check out this mind-numbing interview). In fact, it’s kind of an accomplishment to play the genre as straight as Fishkind does, blithely ignoring decades of criticism and ridicule. I’m glad that Fishkind has the peace of mind to live and write so solipsistically. I sure couldn’t!
Plot: 2 / 5
Themes: 1 / 5
Prose: 2 / 5
