Introduction

Rachel Klein is sacked from her job at the White House after she sends an email criticizing Donald Trump. As she is escorted off the premises she is hit by a speeding car, driven by what the press will discreetly call "a personal friend of the President." Does that explain the flowers, the get-well wishes at a press briefing, the hush money offered by a lawyer at her hospital bedside? Rachel’s recovery is soothed by comically doting parents, matchmaking room-mates, a new job as aide to a journalist whose books aim to defame the President, and unexpected love at the local wine store. But secrets leak, and Rachel’s new-found happiness has to make room for more than a little chaos. Will she bring down the President? Or will he manage to do that all by himself?

Rachel to the Rescue is a mischievous political satire, with a delightful cast of characters, from one of America’s funniest novelists.

Editorial Review

No Editorial Review Currently Available

Excerpt

1

T H E B A D N E W S F I R S T

Unless I amend it, my resume confirms that I truly did work for the forty-fifth president of the United States, if you can call my daily torture-task a job. Even when I hide behind my formal title (Assistant, White House Office of Records Management aka WHORM) I eventually confess that I spent my days taping back together every piece of paper that passed through the hands of Donald J. Trump.

How would a person end up in the administration’s most unnecessary office? Unemployed, I had searched every online job site, including USA.Jobs.com, where I typed in Washington, D.C., and for fun, under locations, “White House”. I rationalized it this way to my one-sided friends and family: 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is the People’s House. It doesn’t belong to any one man or woman or administration, so calm down.

I hadn’t worked on any campaign nor did I have family connections, but someone must’ve liked my professional qualifications, which I could claim as the personal assistant/typist/proofreader/errand-runner for a wealthy New Yorker who intended to self-publish a memoir after his parents were no longer alive to read and disown him. But he died, a fatal heart attack at the breakfast table, before he’d dictated anything beyond his freshman year at, of course, Yale. My White House security clearance sailed through, probably due to my bare-bones employment record, and bachelor’s degree from a college in a red state.

A distracted woman interviewed me for the entry-level job in slapdash fashion. She said my duties would involve a lot of reading; in fact nothing but. Well into the first term of the 45th president, I found myself in a cubicle, one of a dozen men and women of various ages reading incoming mail. There was the positive, the negative, the donors in search of favors; the dangerous, the hate letters and the love letters, the requests for pardons, for clemency, for commuted sentences, for loans, for business advice, for autographed photos; the macaroni paintings, the coffee mugs, the velour renditions of the president; the edibles. The wedding invitations addressed to President and Mrs. Trump were sent to the East Wing. Under the law, letters we would’ve tossed had to be kept — even those griping about service at Trump hotels and building supers in Trump residential buildings.

I didn’t complain about the brittle, discolored, sometimes crumbling paper that had been irradiated before delivery. I look back and wonder, did I stand out in some way in that entry level correspondence job? Was my lateral move a reward or a punishment? Was I especially hard-working or just expendable? Whichever — someone must have noticed that I was a nimble restorer of paper in need of mending.

So, after only thirteen weeks in the Office of Correspondence, I moved to the Old Executive Office Building, upholding the Presidential Records Act. Unstated job description: tape tape tape. Did I get the easy ones, the rare memo that had been merely ripped down the middle? No. I got the confetti. Thankless task? How about an unnecessary one? How about the nagging reality that the leader of the free world was unteachable?

I knew from my days in Correspondence that the President didn’t actually read what the world wrote to him. So, it was no small irony that my very own email reached him, or someone with the power to hire and fire. I didn’t mean to send it; should not have composed it above a department-wide email about refrigerator courtesy. Just for fun, or so I believed, I described my daily grind in terms unflattering to the shredder-in-chief, addressed to my alleged best buddy in the office, which I mistakenly thought — with the judgment one can have late at night after too many Cape Codders — he’d find amusing. I also wrote that I might as well be slaving away in Tehran because every day I identified with the Iranian student militia in “Argo”, who reassembled shredded documents. Probably not a smart reference, nor was my postscript that said, “It would be nice to have a president who had a learning curve.” And then my tanked-up finger hit “reply all”.

It was the epistolary equivalent of death by cop. I didn’t get past Security the day after I sent it. Though I do appreciate that my somewhat treasonous e-letter now resides in the National Archives, not one thing about my three long months on Team Scotch Tape is helping me make friends in 2020.

Luckily my health insurance was good till the end of the month. After being figuratively kicked to the curb, I wandered in something of a daze across 17th Street. Well, halfway across, at which point I was knocked unconscious by a big black car driven by what the newspapers would one day diplomatically refer to as “a personal friend of the president’s”. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

1) Think about the title of the novel. Whom do you think Rachel might be said to be “rescuing”? Does your answer change from the beginning of the book to the end of the book?

2) In the opening pages, Rachel is fired from her unusual (but real!) job at the White House because of a drunken rant and a “reply-all” email. Have you ever done anything similar? What is the worst or most cringeworthy workplace mistake you have made?

3) Discuss the relationship between Rachel and her parents and the ways it changes, and doesn’t change, over the course of the novel. For instance, when Rachel reluctantly returns to her parents’ apartment after the accident, she is resistant to accepting her status as a “boomeranging adult child” (p. 40) Both she and her parents find themselves grappling with very different expectations: to her it is “depressing in ways I didn’t know how to articulate” (p. 32) to discover that her parents have moved on and that all of her childhood belongings are gone or in storage. Does this ring true for you in other parent-child relationships you know? Is there a right or wrong way to grapple with these conflicting expectations?

4) Another interesting parent-child relationship in the novel is between Murray and his son Dougie. Dougie and his brother seem quite upset about Murray’s romance with Mary-Jo and the secrecy that surrounds it. Why do you think everyone is making the choices they do? Which side do you agree with and why?

5) A key plot point in the novel revolves around Donald Trump’s fear of being discovered with an optometrist—of anyone even knowing that, as a seventy-three-year-old man, he uses glasses. Why do you think this is? Do you find this to be a reasonable defense of his personal privacy, or an irrational point of vanity, or something in between? Do you have any physical or behavioral traits that you might want to hide from the world if you were POTUS?

6) In her first meeting with Kirby Champion, Rachel leans into the idea that it is a “crackpot job interview” (p. 67). What red flags are visible early on? Ultimately, do you think Kirby is a good employer? Why or why not? Do you think Rachel should have taken the job? Would you have? What is the strangest job interview you’ve ever had?

7) Why do you think Elizabeth’s attitude toward Rachel changes so much when Yasemin moves in? How does this help Elizabeth come out of her shell? Why are Elizabeth and Yasemin so determined to play matchmakers for Rachel?

8) Both Mandy and Simon seem very determined to get Rachel to leak the news of Veronica’s affair with POTUS. Out of all the people in the administration who could talk to the press about the scoop, why do they choose Rachel?

9) What do you make of Sandra? Do you sympathize with her in the end? Why or why not?

10) In Rachel to the Rescue, Lipman imagines a world where Melania leaves Donald after discovering that “Herman Trump” and Veronica are meeting in the West Wing, a step too far for Melania. Do you think that something like this might have been the final straw in real life? If not, what do you think might have been? Do you feel Melania comes off positively in Rachel to the Rescue?

11) Who is your favorite character in the book and why?

12) As we can expect in any Elinor Lipman novel, there are many twists and turns before we reach the happy ending. What surprised you the most?

13) Lipman has been praised as a writer who can “pierce the heart as well as the funny bone” (New York Daily News). Can you name specific scenes that do both?

Weblinks

»	Author's website

Book Club Recommendations

Recommended to book clubs by 0 of 0 members.

Member Reviews

There are no user reviews at this time.
Rate this book