Review by Kevin Brown
The Payback, Kashana Cauley’s second novel is a combination of social satire and a heist novel, with a hefty dose of dark comedy. Jada begins the novel working at a clothing store in the mall, having lost her job as a costume designer in the film industry over what she refers to as the Incident in the early part of the work. However, she is unable to keep that job due to her penchant for theft that she has been unable to overcome. She ends up living with Lanae and hanging out with Audrey, both of whom work in the same store, after the debt police take everything she owns, which wasn’t much to begin with.
The debt police play an important role in the novel, as they find people who still owe on their student loans and encourage them to pay, largely by beating them up or, as in Jada’s case, beating her up and taking what she owns, even though those possessions will barely affect their overall debt burden. This aspect of the novel is Cauley’s sharpest satire, as the victims are exclusively Black women, who are the most likely to have significant student load debt. Bystanders either ignore the beatings or even heap verbal abuse on the women. Jada, Audrey, and Lanae all commiserate about their situation, talking about the promises schools and society made that led them to take out loans for higher education.
They end up making a plan to try to erase all of the government student loan debt by uploading a virus to their servers, then breaking in to remove the hard drive that serves as a backup. Given that the novel is clearly comic, one can expect everything to work out, one way or another, but the core of the novel is the satire of a society that vilifies people for taking on debt, while also saying that the only way to succeed is through a college degree.
The Payback by Kashana Cauley. Atria Books, July 2025.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels.
