56 pages • 1 hour read
Force of Nature
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Themes
The Impact of Corporate Greed
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of addiction, bullying, and disordered eating.
Throughout the narrative, the author delivers a series of critiques on the impact of corporate greed on corporations, families, and individuals. Bailey Tennant, the company that employs most of the characters, has a long history of financial misconduct, and these illicit activities have given rise to Aaron and Carmen’s fraud investigation. Additionally, the company has a toxic work culture, and Daniel’s role in the company’s financial crimes reflects his lack of personal ethics. As the company’s sordid dealings progress, they cause escalating strife within the Bailey family—particularly between Jill and her father and brother.
Bailey Tennant is a small but lucrative boutique accountancy firm whose founder, Daniel’s father, set up a complex fraud operation that requires the complicity of multiple employees. Each successive generation of the family that takes over is aware of these crimes and has tacitly agreed to take part in them. As a result, the very foundations of the company are built upon organized corruption, and this dynamic lands the company squarely in the crosshairs of Aaron’s federal police investigation. Because everyone involved in the fraud is characterized as an antagonist of one form or another, the very structure of the novel implicitly condemns such criminal practices. Although several of the state police assert that financial crimes are less severe than violent or organized crimes, both Aaron and Carmen disagree and work as hard as they can to secure an indictment.
The protagonists’ belief that financial crimes are just as serious as violent crimes is derived from the harmful impact that white-collar crimes have had on company culture and employee operations. As Aaron and Carmen note, Daniel himself is a known bully who has created a toxic workplace environment for women in particular. The two investigators also draw connections between financial and personal misconduct and characterize white-collar criminals as individuals who have just as little regard for ethics and humanity as violent criminals do. In this light, they argue that although Daniel might not be engaging in acts of violence against his employees, he does display a marked lack of respect for the workers at Bailey Tennant.
Daniel also displays a lack of personal ethics. He benefits from embezzlement at the company and has a lavish lifestyle thanks to his untaxed, illicit income. His home is palatial, and he enjoys a tremendous amount of power and influence, wielding both his unethical attempts to help his son evade prosecution for distributing explicit images of his underage ex-girlfriend. Because Joel is slated to take over the company when Daniel retires, Daniel’s act of covering for Joel reflects his long-term interest in keeping the company’s fraud operation running. In his mind, Bailey Tennant is “a family firm” (129), and because members of the family are expected to work for the company, this central idea drives many of Daniel’s actions.
The Instability of Group Dynamics
This particular theme is most prominently displayed in the increasing animosity that characterizes the women’s hiking group. The group is far from cohesive at the outset, but as the hike goes on, the women’s interactions markedly devolve. Given the novel’s nonlinear approach to the events of the hike, Harper immediately introduces an image of the women’s battered and bloody appearance at the end of the hike to foreshadow just how dramatically their outing will deteriorate during the subsequent flashback chapters. Only four of the five women return from their disastrous “team-building” adventure, and they all bear the physical marks of their damaged relationships. This visual heightens the narrative tension and lends weight to even the most minuscule of disagreements as the author gradually reveals them.
One of the relationships that gets the most attention within the narrative is that of the twins, Beth and Bree, who prove to be a study in opposites. Bree is a physically fit, work-oriented go-getter who is determined to climb the corporate ladder. By contrast, her sister Beth is characterized by her smoking habit and her lack of preparedness for the hike, as well as by her history of addiction and her past incarceration. The two sisters are not close, and their deeply damaged relationship frays further under the stress of the hike. Bree is loath to be seen in the same light as her sister and does her best to distance herself from Beth, behaving unkindly and becoming increasingly irritated with Beth as the hike goes on. However, a significant bond remains despite these differences. On a deeper level, Bree does want to help Beth, and when she suspects that Beth might have killed Alice, she is compelled to hide Alice’s body. The sisters therefore have a tension-laden relationship that is never quite on stable footing, and both sisters take part in the physical altercation at the end of the book.
Bree is not the only character to mistreat Beth. In large part because of Beth’s past, she becomes the group’s scapegoat as their hike starts to go wrong. She is blamed for offenses large and small, and this injustice places an increasing amount of strain on her, becoming the catalyst for her role in the group-wide fight. When this struggle breaks out, it is evident that Beth refuses to bear the blame for the group’s misfortunes, and she therefore snaps and assaults Alice. It is important to note that Harper uses the women’s harsh treatment of Beth to both invoke and condemn the subtle classism and prejudice against individuals with substance use disorders and criminal histories. The women are largely a privileged bunch, and Beth is the lowest-paid employee and the only individual with a “checkered” past. This group-wide bullying thus demonstrates the way that group dynamics often fracture along pre-established fault lines during situations of heightened stress. In this case, Beth becomes the scapegoat because she is already the target of each woman’s scorn.
Another existing fault line can be found in the group’s general dislike of Alice. At work, Alice is a ruthless bully who does not treat her colleagues with respect, and she also demonstrates the same manipulative, self-interested, and cruel behavior during the hike, becoming increasingly unpleasant when the group gets lost. Although she primarily bullies Beth, she is also unkind to the rest of the women, and ultimately, her verbal abuse incites the group’s violent altercation. As their fractured group dynamics devolve into physical fighting, Harper uses this scenario to explore the interpersonal hazards that arise when problematic groups are subjected to extreme stresses from within and without. Although these women are well-trained in problem-solving and appropriate workplace behavior, their willingness to resort to violence demonstrates the difficulties that arise when already-fraught relationships are subjected to unusual levels of strain.
The Extremity of Parents’ Protective Instincts
Harper uses several different characters to demonstrate the lengths to which parents will go to protect their children. The narrative depicts several different parenting models, each of which explores the parent-child bond in a nuanced way. Daniel and Alice are both unethical parents who model bad behavior for their children and also help their children avoid behavioral consequences. By contrast, Lauren finds herself unable to protect her child and suffers an emotional crisis of her own as a result. On yet another level, Jill is willing to sacrifice her relationship with her family to safeguard her children from the unethical world of Bailey Tennant’s financial crimes, and despite her years of silent complicity, she nonetheless becomes one of the novel’s key moral centers as a result.
Daniel, whose wealth is largely derived from embezzlement, uses his influence and legal resources to help his son evade conviction after Joel distributes illicit images of his underage ex-girlfriend—Margot, Alice’s daughter. Significantly, Daniel is unbothered by Joel’s unethical actions and even goes as far as to deny that his son is guilty of any wrongdoing. Similarly, Daniel himself skirts the boundaries of the law in his treatment of women, and the narrative therefore implies that Joel has learned his misogyny from his father. Similarly, Alice passes on her ethical failings to her daughter, Margot, who is just as cruel to Lauren’s daughter Rebecca as Alice once was to Lauren herself. Although Alice is willing to admit that Margot’s bullying behavior is unethical, like Daniel she still defends Margot and shields her from the consequences of her behavior, rationalizing that Margot will be well-served by adopting an attitude of ruthlessness to deal with the cutthroat adult world, as Alice herself as done. In another move that echoes Daniel, Alice helps Margot escape official consequences, wielding her substantial influence to convince the school not to engage in disciplinary action. As Lauren accusatorily asks Alice, “How much extra did you donate to the school this year? How much did it cost to buy Margot that blind eye?” (292). The sheer outrage in her tone conveys the novel’s overall condemnation of the unethical behavior underlying this transgression and broader white-collar crimes.
While Alice and Daniel represent many of the injustices that Harper implicitly critiques, Lauren proves to be a far more complex figure. She is not figured as an antagonist, and although she would like to protect her daughter Rebecca from bullying, she does not exert her full efforts to make this wish a reality. Alice therefore accuses Lauren of hyper-passivity and of failing to stand up for herself and her daughter over the years. Throughout much of the novel, Lauren does indeed fail in this regard, and after Margot’s bullying accelerates Rebecca’s disordered eating, Lauren does not deal directly with the issue; her only act of support is to allow Rebecca to stay home from school. Thus, Lauren’s sole act of agency comes when she finally assaults (and inadvertently murders) Alice, and it is important to note that she does so only after the conversation moves to the subject of parenting. For this reason, Lauren’s crime is cast as a direct response to Alice’s willingness to enable Margot’s bullying behavior; killing Alice becomes an act of revenge, and Lauren sees her crime as a way to make up for failing to protect her daughter in the past.
Like Lauren and Alice, Jill will also go to extreme lengths to protect her child, although she differs from the other characters by refraining from criminal activity or bribery. Jill is keenly aware of her family’s history of financial crimes, and she refuses to participate in these crimes herself. She has always regretted her acquiescence to her family’s expectations that she would join the company, and she therefore decides not to force her children into the family business. By allowing them to pursue their dreams, she fractures her relationship with her brother and her father, but she willingly accepts this consequence to protect her children’s futures.
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By Jane Harper
