The Novel I Didn’t Mean to Write

How a novel that began as satire became something else entirely: a story about awareness, complicity, and what it costs to act on what you see.

I didn’t set out to write about entitlement or privilege. I set out to write a clever workplace satire: Groundhog Day meets Office Space. A man working at a mid-size company, trapped in random time loops, mentored by a Franz Kafka visiting from a parallel universe. It was supposed to be more funny than serious.

The book that it became is not that book.

I spent years as a product manager in corporate America, and that's the vantage point the novel grew out of. In a role like that, you talk to everyone: executives, managers, warehouse staff and customers. You watch how decisions get made, how they get avoided, and where accountability quietly disappears.

Most American workplaces run on contradictions of one kind or another. Family values on the wall, layoffs on the spreadsheet, landscaping budget untouched. Mission statements about people, while the metrics measure something else entirely. Everyone is working hard, most of them well-intentioned, and the system is doing what systems do, regardless.

What struck me most as an employee was how we participate in the flawed parts and justify them, whether out of convenience, ambition, or because the alternative feels like betrayal. That's the question the novel kept circling back to, even when I wasn't ready to write it: why do people defend the systems that harm them, and what does it cost to stop?

Then 2020 happened. George Floyd, the protests, the lockdowns. I started reading more widely, partly to make sense of the moment. Baldwin, Coates, Morrison, Reid. The reading sharpened questions in my head about how institutions behave under pressure, about who gets protected and who gets discarded, about the gap between what people say they value and what they actually do.

The novel started to feel inadequate to those questions. I tried to layer the new material in. Cody confronted his apathy, gave a speech echoing John Brown's trial, and the themes thickened. But the result was stitched together.

James Baldwin had a name for what I'd written without meaning to. He called it a “protest novel.” He used it as a critique for books that traded humanity for moral messaging, that flattened people into vehicles for the author's conclusions. I read his essay and recognized my own draft.

The book didn't need editing. It needed a teardown.

I cut Kafka. I scrapped the time loop. I rebuilt Cody from scratch. I stopped trying to write a message and started trying to write a mirror.

What emerged was a novel about privilege, entitlement, and complicity inside an institution that runs on all three. Cody is comfortable. The company is exploitative. Looking away is the easiest thing in the world. The story is about what happens when he stops looking away, and what it costs him.

Race is one of the things he sees. So is fraud. So is retaliation against a coworker who challenged power. So is his own self-absorption, which turns out to be the deeper problem.

Cody's flaw isn't that he doesn't understand the world. It's that he's so focused on his own problems and finding solutions to them that he's missed what's in front of him. The book is about him learning to look outward.

Cody is the lens, not the lesson. That was deliberate. A protagonist pronouncing on the world from the author's pulpit is the failure mode Baldwin warned about, and I'd already written that draft once. I wasn't going to write it again.

What's left is a story about a man learning to look outward, and finding the courage to act on what he sees.

Whether the looking-away is about race, or about a workplace that's hurting people, or about a relationship that needs honesty, or about anything else that asks comfort to give something up, the shape of the question is the same: why do some challenge the status quo while others defend it, even when it harms them?

The novel doesn't answer that.

That's the book I tried to write. Not a sermon, not a verdict, not a redemption arc. A mirror with a question in it.

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