onthefloorStop me if you’ve heard this one before.

It’s a man’s world. And in this man’s world, a woman has to shed – or at least suppress – her femininity so that she can play hardball with the Masters of the Universe surrounding her. Because she’s the protagonist, she thrives on a combination of talent and looks that has cemented her position in the upper-upper-middle class. But when she’s away from the daily panopticon of bosses and lecherous coworkers and the cold grind of the business sphere, she finds time to drink to excess in her expensive apartment, to seek advice about men from her high-fashion and secretly treacherous best girlfriend, to pine over the perfect boyfriend who left her in the middle of a fabulous Eurpoean vacation, to wonder about her mysterious benefactor in exotic Hong Kong, and to worry about her dog. In the end, our plucky heroine escapes the creeps, defeats the boss, saves the day and ultimately chooses to go her own way, Edie Brickell crooning on the soundtrack as the credits roll. See the works of Candace Bushnell, Helen Fielding or Sophie Kinsella.

Or this one.

In a world where most people are barely able to figure out the tip on a bar bill without a calculator, our protagonist is able to interpret the daily flood of numbers like a sailor reads the wind and tides, and this talent has brought her awkward success and undue attention that she works to appear like she’s working to avoid. Escaping the dull, harsh poverty and institutional ignorance of Catholic Ireland and its strict nuns and dour parents and suicidal siblings, our quirky neuro-atypical narrator uses her “tricks” to charm and intrigue the people who would take advantage of her, and eventually to save herself. See certain novels of Marc Haddon, Steve Martin, Jonathan Lethem, and just about any Irish writer’s work before they turned forty.

Or this one.

The world is vast and complex, and forces hidden like icebergs conspire in subtle ways to covertly direct how each and every one of the little people lives. Wars are started. Markets are created and destroyed. The rich fleece each other, accumulating sudden fortunes, robbing the world blind. Among these Randian machinations, small, flawed individuals try to surf the waves of economic injustice and fashion, meeting in shining centers of commerce on multiple continents, in skyscraper offices and back-alley noodle shops. Some of these people are heroes, some are monsters, some are winners and some are cannon fodder. The big machine ticks on and the little people disperse carrying their wounds and winnings. See the novels of William Gibson, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo.

While you’re roaming around, schedule a viewing of In the Company of Men or Glengarry Glen Ross to refresh (if you’re not already painfully exposed to and/or victimized by it on a daily basis) your sense of testosterone-fueled business barbarity, maybe take a look through Joe Sacco’s War Junkie for an undercurrent of 1990s Gulf War nostalgia, and add just a soupรงon of unexpected rape/murder terror by watching a Law and Order: SVU marathon or maybe reviewing the scary bits of The Wasp Factory.

If the above agglomeration of tropes seems a bit much to swallow in one reading but nonetheless achieves various modes of entertaining, then Aifric Campbell’s On the Floor is your kind of novel. The sweaty, mendacious gruntwork of international market trading permeates the story of Geri Molloy’s precarious rise (yet never quite the fall). Campbell was the first woman to manage the London trading floor and, honestly, the scenes in that strange, rarified environment – with jargon and consequences that Campbell presents without exposition but with perfect clarity – are enough of a hook to pull the reader through what is otherwise a novel composed of conflicts lifted from other genres. These borrowed bits weaken a novel that is otherwise written with remarkably strong craft. Campbell draws distinct, interesting characters (even when they are jackasses), has a natural ear for narration and realistc, significant dialogue, and paces individual scenes almost perfectly. This is one of the rare books I’ve read where there wasn’t a single sentence that failed to flow, and while the novel is narrated by Geri Molloy herself, Campbell manages to avoid the banal, colloquial narration that plagues so much first-person perspective.

One chapter, “Chinese Wall,” could be the centerpiece of a Coen Brothers movie, with its richly-furnished boardroom, vaguely violently gregarious Texan oilman, background of suited brokers and wizard-like boss, all peering and pawing at Geri as they send her off to China to cement the Big Deal. The scenes with Geri and her firm’s directors and salesmen, or those with her sitting across from the creepily misogynist and misanthropist investor Felix Mann, are complex and rich with class, gender and cultural conflict subtly portrayed. On the Floor was longlisted for the UK Women’s Prize for Fiction (formerly the Orange Prize) for good reason. There is a lot to enjoy in the book, from the workings of market in the early death of pit trading to big business ethics on the eve of war, to the sandbagged (still true even in recent memory) experiences of a woman participating in the male-dominated spheres of mathematics and finance.

The worst that can be said about the book is that there are a few chapters and subplots borrowed from commercial fiction standards that feel unnecesarily wedged into the book. Geri’s failed romance and the betrayal connected to it come off as a bone thrown to some corporate expectation of a female audience. The out-of-nowhere abduction chapter featuring Geri’s schlubby co-worker stands in stark tonal mismatch to the rest of the book (Felix Mann and Anil Kappor, the dueling sorcerors of finance in Geri’s life provide a much more nauseating terror than does the low-grade psychotic “Pie Man”), and the Scheherazade-esque story Geri’s tells her captor about her Irish childhood traumas, while perhaps interesting in isolation, comes too late in the book to build her backstory and doesn’t really provide any further dimension to her character in service of the larger story.

Early in the book, Geri says, “You have to have a nice speaking voice to work in Corporate Finance. You have to be able to hold your drink to work on the trading floor.” For novelists, a solid voice will take you a long way, but to really succeed with a short novel, they also have to avoid distractions. On the Floor definitely has the nice speaking voice. Like Geri Molloy, though, it doesn’t always successfully hold its drink.