How to Earn Your Keep
by Deahn Berrini
Four Square Press. 287 pages, $14.
DEAHN BERRINI’S How To Earn Your Keep is a tentative novel, full of almosts. It has aspects of a legal thriller, shadings of chick lit, and something akin to a coming out story, braided into a larger narrative about finding one’s moral compass in trying times. It’s an engaging mix, if hesitant in its delivery.
Twenty-one-year-old Kit Lavoie is living at home. After losing a college scholarship, she’s the sole source of reliable income for her brother Larry and her helpless, dependent mother. Her job with a personal injury lawyer relies on constant fudging of truths and blurring the lines of acceptable behavior. When her boss latches onto a potentially lucrative case, Kit worries about the harm it will do to the defendant. Meanwhile, her brother is breaking up with a girlfriend, meandering from job to job, and might be in love with a boy.
For the most part, Berrini follows these threads and keeps them well-ordered. Kit spends much of the novel obsessing over a winter coat that represents her class aspirations. When she acquires it through her brother’s wrongdoing, her sense of ethics begins to assert itself. Kit is a complex character. Despite being at the novel’s center, she’s often unlikeable. Her demands that her mother and brother contribute to the household are legitimate, but she dumps a boyfriend she viewed as too working class, hooks up with a musician and leaves, claiming to be glad he doesn’t know where she lives because his apartment is dingy, and can’t find it within herself to be happy for her best friend’s engagement because the fiancé looks like he’s going to get fat with age. In the course of the book, a character is kicked by a spooked horse. There were times when it seemed it might take a similar blow to jolt Kit out of her foul attitude.
The book posits Larry’s gradual coming out, at nineteen, as the catalyst for Kit’s awakening. In a work more strongly identified with the tropes of chick lit, a world-weary and wise homosexual can often show the way to a struggling single girl, and it’s not uncommon for a gay nineteen-year-old to seem both world-weary and wise, especially if he attended American public schools. When we first see Larry, he’s at home, modeling a fancy silk robe and watching soap operas with his mother, and he does appear to be gay. However, he’s been keeping his “sexual propulsions” under wraps—that is, until he meets Billy one night at a bar. The young man gets Larry a job and they begin an affair. Billy steals liquor from the boss, Larry blows his paychecks on extravagant food, and the family’s utilities totter on the brink of being turned off. But nothing comes decisively to a head until the very last page, when there’s an indication that the family will be resilient and survive whatever comes their way.
It’s tempting to imagine this novel as it would have been had Berrini staked it more firmly within the confines of genre fiction. The personal injury case brings in some colorful characters who would have received more stage time in a thriller. A romantic comedy could have made sport of Kit’s fussiness about unsuitable mates and would have guaranteed her a boyfriend by story’s end. And Larry’s travails might have been more keenly felt if his sexual identity had been more clearly established at the outset. As it stands, How To Earn Your Keep’s greatest strength is its lack of commitment to any single perspective. We must take or leave this family at face value and wish them the best.
________________________________________________________
Heather Seggel is a writer living in Ukiah, California.
