Every morning, the same thing. Alarm clock. Snooze. Alarm clock. Drag your carcass out of bed, claw your clothes on, slog to the office. Everything’s normal because, well, why wouldn’t it be? It’s work – the very apogee of sameness. All the staplers look the same and they’ll look the same tomorrow. But what if your office was in fact the headquarters of a secret agency coordinating deadly young female combatants on dangerous international missions?
That is the workplace imagined by Manuel Gonzales in his debut novel, The Regional Office is Under Attack! The “Regional Office” is a New York-based outfit run by shadowy characters named Oyemi and Dr Niles, situated deep underground, beneath a normal-seeming travel agency (customers gain access by asking the front desk for a trip to Akron, Ohio). On a wall at level B4, “stenciled on the wall in light-blue calligraphy,” is this legend:
The Regional Office: uniquely positioned to Empower and Strengthen otherwise troubled or at-risk Young Women to act as a Barrier of last resort between the survival of the Planet and the amassing Forces of Darkness that Threaten, at nearly every turn, to Destroy It.
If these lines remind you of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, you’re on the right track: this book is about violent, sassy young women trained to wreak havoc, and the ambiguously-trustworthy administrators who put them to work. It’s also about a girl named Sarah O’Hara (the most palindromic protagonist in fiction?) who works in the office, and what happens to her before, during and after people show up at her workplace to destroy it. Every day “nitwits send her emails about resetting their voice mail passwords”, but today Sarah has an appointment with destiny.
Gonzales has already published one book, a well-reviewed collection of stories called The Miniature Wife (2013). Living in Austin, Texas, he once ran a kids’ learning center called the Bat Cave, and baked pies at the Clarksville Pie Company. These are all jobs that could be setups for action hero movies, and Regional Office certainly has more than a hint of the Marvel universe in it. Some characters get altered by strange irradiation events, others are partially bionic. There is love and death and punching.
The plot is as explosively paced as a comic book’s, but juggles some dextrous genre shifts. The novel has an epistolary element, framing its story inside a scholarly article on the Regional Office written by a very obviously unreliable author. The rest of the plot plays out through flashback, present-tense heroic action, radical perspective shifts and, of course, cartoonish violence.
Regional Office is movie-like in genre, structure and texture. The combat scenes aren’t merely cinematic; Gonzales relies on your knowledge of movie-screen (or videogame) fights in order to imagine his written ones. Using only a few words, Gonzales booby-traps a room with poison-gas vents and wildly whirling blades. An assassin named Rose thinks to herself: “Double back handspring. Super jump with a backflip. Land again with a kick to disable the other spinning-blade number.” She kicks a killing-machine to pieces, then grabs it to “discus that bitch at two more gun turrets”. Unbreakable women who look cool and kick ass are no strangers to us. We owe our capacity to turn Gonzales’s works into jawdropping visuals to action movies and TV shows, not novels.
Gonzales plays tribute to many movies in his novel, explicitly or implicitly. Die Hard is cited twice, which makes perfect sense since the characters do plenty of crawling through vents and negotiating hostage situations. The book points to everything from Mission Impossible to Charlie’s Angels to Terminator to Idle Hands. Its closest analogue in cinema, though is probably Three Days of the Condor. Gonzales doesn’t refer to the movie in so many words, but there’s no other work of art I can think of in which the hero’s office, which is actually a secret agency in disguise, gets attacked by its enemies.
The 1975 thriller stars Robert Redford as a CIA operative working at an office disguised as a literary-historical research center. One morning he shows up to work, and so do a bunch of highly-trained assassins. What’s happening, and how can he solve the mystery? Sarah O’Hara faces the same problems, but all alone and without Redford’s male bombast. It’s a welcome update.
Gonzales’s book engages with the clichés laid down by the 70s political thriller, but it does so creatively. It gathers up conventions of all genres – hot killer assassin teens, hostage-scenario nailbiter, supernatural mystery – without sinking into any of them, or letting them get stale.
The Regional Office is Under Attack! honors the most ordinary and duplicable of physical spaces. Sarah is clutching an iPad when “the client elevator dinged and that ding was followed by voices, unfamiliar, gruff voices, and those voices were followed by screams, which were followed then by more voices and gunshots and then even more screams”. Gonzales fills the workaday office with a glorious plot, giving voice to the John McClane fantasies lying dormant in cubicles across the world.
The novel is not the subtlest or most literary ever written, but the emotional currents flowing beneath and through Gonzales’s blockbuster action scenes are remarkably well rendered. I inhaled this book so quickly that I missed plot points on first read: best to let it wash over you and then marvel in retrospect at the clues you flew past.
There are a few holes here and there in the book’s universe. Why do the girl assassins miraculously self-heal when injured? Where does the money come from? Why doesn’t the book’s main character show up until 50-odd pages in? But Gonzales’s world of shifting allegiances and magical bad girls will suck you in and keep you up late. Just don’t read it at work. You never know what might happen.
