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Summary
Chapter 8: Selling the General
Stephanie’s boss Dolly Peale, also known as La Doll, is a PR consultant hired by a foreign genocidal dictator called "The General" to rehabilitate his public persona. She’s dubious about the morality of the job but is also desperately in need of money, so she takes it. Her initial attempt to gain public sympathy for him involves photographing him in a fuzzy blue hat, but his team—who speak to her through his aide, Arc—are furious when the New York Times runs a story saying that the hat suggests The General has cancer. Dolly firmly tells The General to cut the chinstraps off the hat and fluff his hair out, and the result is an immediate success. The General looks so sweet and innocent that the Times publishes another headline which questions the seriousness of the war crimes he’s committed.
Dolly hopes a similar turnaround can happen for her, as two years earlier she accidentally ruined her own life. At the time, she was a hugely successful PR consultant who achieved celebrity status by rehabilitating the careers of many Hollywood luminaries. On New Year’s Eve she threw a glamorous, A-list party and created a display involving acrylic trays filled with a mixture of oil and water, intending to create a striking visual effect. Unfortunately, spotlights heated the oil and caused the trays to melt, sending scalding liquid falling through the air, and burning and disfiguring most of her famous guests.
Because she froze with shock and didn’t immediately call the emergency services, people accused her of sabotage, and she was personally and financially ruined. Now, having spent six months in jail, she hopes that fixing The General up and landing a new client, Kitty Jackson, will get her back into the media’s good graces. Kitty is in hot water for some provocative activist behavior, and Dolly, believing that she can use this to her advantage, arranges for Kitty and the General to meet in his unnamed home country.
Dolly’s nine-year-old daughter Lulu, who has wanted nothing to do with her mother since the oil-and-water fiasco, surprises Dolly by asking to join the trip. When they get to the airport and meet Kitty, Dolly worries that she’s made a huge mistake, as Kitty looks haggard and unrecognizable. After landing, they get in a car and pass through many checkpoints before arriving at the General's enormous mansion. Dolly notices that there are burn marks sprinkled all over one of Kitty’s wrists, and Kitty implies that she made them herself to make it look as though she were at Dolly’s disastrous soiree. Arc comes out and tells them that they need to go to a second location to meet The General, but that they will sleep there for the night. Kitty stays at the mansion and Arc takes Lulu and Dolly into the city. The people respond to The General’s men with barely concealed fear. Lulu and Dolly buy and devour a star fruit from a terrified roadside vendor.
The next day, Kitty has dressed up and looks wonderful. They drive into the mountains and arrive at a hidden compound, where The General comes out to greet them. Kitty shakes his hand and smiles as Dolly takes photos with a hidden camera. She’s elated, thinking she has everything she needs, when Kitty suddenly begins to ask The General graphic questions about his war crimes. It’s a catastrophe, and Kitty is bludgeoned and taken away. Lulu and Dolly are sent back to America immediately. Lulu tries to sell her pictures to the papers, initially to disbelief that they’re real but eventually to enormous success. Kitty is alive, and the media firestorm forces the General to release her and to transition his country into a democracy. Dolly and Lulu move upstate, where Dolly opens a deli with the hush money Arc wires her. She and Lulu sometimes get a box of star fruit in the mail.
Analysis
Dolly's desperate attempt to rehabilitate her own life, as well as her literal and metaphorical obsession with self-image, are the focus of this chapter. When she accidentally injures her high-profile guests at a party, Dolly appears to experience the event in slow motion, watching in horror as celebrities and other luminaries are burned by scalding liquid right in front of her. She is temporarily frozen by shock, and the fact that she doesn’t react instantly leads people to accuse her of engineering the incident on purpose.
She’s sent to jail on a charge commonly distributed for deadly accidents—criminal negligence— and when she emerges, she has totally changed her physical appearance. One accident—caused by one poorly conceived decor choice—completely derails her life, which also severely impacts her own self-understanding as a talented and fundamentally good person.
Dolly's derailment continues when she decides that the only way she can restore her reputation and earn enough to live on is to take the job of rehabilitating the public image of a genocidal dictator called The General, an old man accused of a lifetime of war crimes. Her justification—that she needs the money in order to raise her daughter Lulu— wears thin when one considers that she’ll be complicit in encouraging the public to forgive a man who has committed genocide against his own people. Dolly is very good at her job; weaponizing her motherhood—even to convince herself—is an excellent PR stunt.
The sneaky ways Dolly changes the public’s perception of The General speak to how concerned the people in the world of this novel are with outward appearances. Dolly initially attempts to repair his image by dressing him in a fuzzy blue hat, trying to capitalize on the fact that he can look old and frail if he wants to. After an initial snafu in which the press interprets the hat as an indication that The General might have cancer, Dolly’s hat strategy is so effective that major newspapers begin to publish speculation that previous reports may have greatly overstated The General’s crimes. As long as he looks harmless, the public are more likely to believe he is harmless. Suddenly, he seems like an old man wearing a silly hat to keep warm. Despite his terrible crimes, his perceived frailty and mortality makes him seem human.
Because public perception can both build and destroy careers, Kitty’s erratic behavior and fall from grace while in America mirror Dolly’s own downfall. She’s persona non grata with the press and with directors because of her public stances and some questionably legal activist activities. However, when Kitty behaves unpredictably or disruptively in America, the worst thing that can happen to her is losing her career. Because of her privilege, she fails to realize that displeasing a tyrannical ruler in a foreign country could have life-threatening consequences. By publicly asking about the genocide, Kitty’s lack of self-awareness endangers her life. Indeed, Kitty’s celebrity status makes her lose track of her own mortality, endangering the lives of everyone around her.
