Book Review : Charlene Elsby - The Organizaton Is Here To Support You (2025)

"Don't become your job" is an injunction that works both ways. Your current self is as susceptible of telling it your younger self as your younger self is to tell the you that's reading this sentence. But it's difficult. There aren't a lot of life scripts your can follow if you don’t understand who you are and few people do at a young age. You either become a professional or a parent. Charlene Elsby's new novel The Organization Is Here To Support You explores the former and how much of a fucking shitshow it can become.

The Organization Is Here To Support You tells the story of Clarissa Knowles (a first protagonist with a name for Elsby), a level 07 worker in the organization, a pre-apocalyptic superstructure that does everything despite that employees spending their entire days discussing things like procedure and task definition. Fresh off a painful split with an existentialist named Maurice (lol), childless and parentless, the lives of Clarissa and her cat Dorian (double lol) revolve a whole lot around the organization and its culture.

The Organization As A Self

This is quite different from the rest of Charlene Elsby's output. Clarissa Knowles doesn’t harbor the extreme inner violence and anger most of her protagonists to and it leaves her vulnerable inside this maze of self-interested people for whom relationships are inherently transactional to job advancement. Because she doesn’t have parents, children or even a boyfriend anymore, poor Clarissa doesn’t have much of an existence outside or the organization and yet she exists only accessorily to her coworkers.

Of course, there’s the wonderfully named Dick who is technically an independent acknowledger of her existence. Among the myriad of references in The Organization Is Here To Support You, this fun wink to David Cronenberg’s cinema is perhaps the flashiest and most harrowing allusion to how volatile mediated relationships can be. I’m not going to spoil it for you, but there's a scene where Dick comes that is perhaps my favorite scene Charlene Elsby has even written. It’s hilarious and ghoulish all at once.

So yeah, the organization becomes a part of Clarissa as she invests herself into it and Clarissa becomes a part of the organization, facilitating changes (with her consent or not) and rewriting the rules by taking decisions to which she doesn’t understand the circumstances. Charlene Elsby captures this idea of the corporation-as-a-legal-person and broke it down into a series of believable scene who can lead to an individual living her entire life within the parameters of a corporation.

If this doesn’t creep you out, I don’t know what can.

The Curious Case of Devin Brault

One detail that makes The Organization Is Here To Support You extremely vivid is the pervasive use of corporative vernacular and passive-aggressive verbal jousts that happen between ambitious people who are under the scrutiny of an even more ambitious boss. These live best through the character of Devin Brault, the conniving underachiever perpetually looking forward to get ahead while letting others do his job. If you read this review, you probably have a Devin Brault in you life. We all do.

Brault is not exactly subtle, but he’s fun because he grossly abuses the verbiage of company rules in order to breach inherent, unwritten company rules himself. It's both super infuriating and great at the same time because he demonstrates the futility and the thinness of the veneer of professionalism behind byzantine corporation who puff their chest with intimidating facades. Inside the towers, there are full of people like Devin, swinging dick and not knowing what the hell they’re supposed to do.

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I’ve been championing Charlene Elsby’s work for about five years now, but I feel like The Organization Is Here To Support You is really the first time where she was able to pull away from her solipsism and allowed herself to be understood entirely through a character that’s a little more removed from her. Clarissa is meek, but she’s endearing in her own way. The novel isn’t though. It’s ferocious, oddly funny and it has an aura of Ballardian respectability that she should keep exploring. This was a wonderful read.

8.5/10

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