The Extinction of Irena Rey v. Margo’s Got Money Troubles
The 2025 Tournament of Books, presented by Field Notes, is an annual battle royale among 16 of the best novels of the previous year.
MARCH 26 • SEMIFINALS
The Extinction of Irena Rey
v. Margo’s Got Money Troubles
Judged by Sammy Loren
Sammy Loren’s nonfiction appears in Elle, Paper, Nylon, Interview, and others. His fiction has been published in The Dry River and serialized in La Prensa, Mexico’s largest tabloid. He lives in Los Angeles and curates the reading series Casual Encountersz. Known connections to this year’s contenders: None. / sammyloren.com / 📷 @sjlorenn / 📷 @casualencountersz / X
Let me start by admitting that both Rufi Thorpe’s Margo’s Got Money Troubles and Jennifer Croft’s The Extinction of Irena Rey hit my trash-meets-highbrow mix of tastes with near algorithmic precision. A college student fucks her lit professor, gets pregnant and becomes an OnlyFans star? A group of translators go mad while deciphering a narcissistic writer’s opus in rural Poland? Sign me up!
To their credit both novels are formally inventive and I like how each author plays with form to comment on the nature of storytelling. Margo’s Got Money Troubles alternates between Margo’s first-person narration and an omniscient third person. The voices are not particularly distinct, but they don’t need to be because they’re both Margo in the end: one Margo’s internal monologue and the other, a work Margo is writing about her tumultuous life. This structure’s lesson of empowerment—of young Margo telling her own story—feels a bit cringe, but only because I’m jaded, not because it’s not a needed reminder in today’s toxic discourse.
Seeing how The Extinction of Irena Rey follows a chorus of pretentious literary translators, it’s unsurprising that Croft twists the book’s form to sardonic effect. The meat of the novel is diaristically told by Rey’s most loyal disciple, Argentine translator Emilia. Yet it opens with a note from Emilia’s translator Alexis, who happens to also be Rey’s English translator—and Emilia’s rival throughout the book.
I’m an easy mark for these Borgesian puzzles, and appreciate that both novelists try to push the conceptual boundaries of fiction. Croft, however, displays a more deft hand, using the conceit and subsequent translator annotations to illustrate her characters’ pettiness and anxieties.
So I let Alexis talk…and I began to hate her, in my bones and in their marrow…I hated her for her incessant nervous laughter. 35*
*35 - I have been trying to eliminate this habit (Trans.).
The puzzles are fun, at first, but Croft’s characters’ neuroses slow down the main story, which is that their beloved author mysteriously vanishes, leaving the gang of sycophantic translators to realize that they maybe never understood the author at all.
By contrast, Thorpe’s style of comedy feels more effortless, less self-aware, as it should be for a 20-year-old, single-mother OnlyFans starlet.
Every day, I’m like, The world is complex and wondrous, everything is so nuanced, and then I turn on the computer, and it’s like, ‘Look at my dick, look at my dick, dick, dick, dick, dick!’
FROM OUR SPONSOR
Yet despite Thorpe’s attempts to make her novel quirky—a mother who worked at Hooters! A pro-wrestling father named Jinx!—I sensed a sentimentality lurking beneath the surface. The United States recently elected an authoritarian, immigrants are being rounded up, and casual cruelty and racism is back en vogue. A novel as topical as Margo’s Got Money Troubles, a book that follows a single mother bilking men on OnlyFans and doom-scrolling TikTok, seems to surreally offer up Obama-era HR speak.
Ward had warned her not to make Mark look like a total bad guy, so she tried to be evenhanded and generous… even though he was a morally bankrupt, navel-gazing little troll.
Call me louche, but I’m close with a lot of sex workers and OnlyFans models. All are insightful and witty and ruthless—necessary skills to thrive in the lion’s den that is sex work in the US. I’ve never heard any of them call anyone “morally bankrupt” or “navel-gazing.” I’m not saying an OnlyFans star saying those words is impossible, the world’s a big place after all, but I am saying it seems unlikely that those sentiments would come out of a 20-year-old cam girl. This sentimentality turns moralistic at times, even though I doubt Thorpe intends it to. In fact, I feel like Thorpe set out to write a more irreverent novel, but that a certain puritanism crept in anyway.
“You literally said you were thinking about keeping the baby because you thought it’s what a good person would do.”
“Then maybe I didn't mean that.”
“And since when do you care about being a good person? I mean, you were fucking somebody’s husband.”
“I know,” Margo said. But she didn’t. She’d always known Mark was a terrible person, but she had not quite registered that she was terrible too until this very moment.
Judging a 20-year-old for fucking an older, married man—and judging the married man for that matter—are perfectly reasonable things to do. However, they do not make for rich or compelling literature. If anything, it’s exactly these moral minefields, if treated less critically, that could have made the characters far more complex, human, and juicy. That’s not to say that I didn’t have a lot of fun while reading Margo’s Got Money Troubles. It’s cinematic and funny, posing important questions about class and agency and the power of storytelling.
The Extinction of Irena Rey sometimes meanders through the Polish countryside, and its sexual intrigue is G-rated, but I believe the novel has something urgent to say about our current moment. The way we as a society fetishize celebrity—actors, politicians, and as the characters in Croft’s novel do, yes, even novelists—can be dangerous. It’s important to remember that our heroes, no matter how mesmerizing their work and celebrated their genius, are first and foremost human beings. And as Croft’s novel so exactingly shows, human beings will always disappoint us.
Advancing:
The Extinction of Irena Rey
Match Commentary
with Kevin Guilfoile and John Warner
Kevin Guilfoile: John, I am not close with a lot of sex workers and OnlyFans models, at least not that I’m aware of. But I was recently pointed to a YouTube documentary about Lily Phillips, a British OnlyFans star who set out to have sex with 100 subscribers in one day. Outside of its theme, the doc itself is not explicit—it consists largely of interviews with Phillips, other performers in the industry, and Phillips’s fans. And there were a couple of exchanges that stood out.
At one point the filmmaker, a South African YouTuber named Josh Pieters, asks Phillips, “Have you done anything to make sure none of these men have a criminal record?” She replies, “We actually have not… I think we’ll be fine, I’m really not sure.”
Later she explains that the men will be wearing condoms, but she will also allow them, if they like, to ejaculate into her mouth. Pieters asks, “What about HIV?” Lily says, “Is that where it comes from? I’ve never really thought about that.”
OnlyFans models certainly can be, as Judge Loren says, insightful and witty and ruthless. They can also be shockingly and dangerously naive. They run the gamut of all kinds of people and personalities, and I think Margo’s character comfortably fits within the margins of believability, especially in the context of a comic novel. In fact, we might have saner laws about sex work in this country if we stopped thinking about sex workers as a special class of people. As Judge Loren says, celebrities (even the sex kind) are first and foremost human beings. I think Margo does a fine job reminding us of this.
John Warner: I think it’s interesting that you label Margo’s Got Money Troubles a “comic” novel, which I completely agree with, but it’s worth noting that while much of the marketing copy and endorsements talk about how funny it is, it’s primarily positioned as a “heartwarming” novel. I would characterize The Wedding People as essentially a comic novel as well (perhaps All Fours too, really), but we don’t call them that because “comic” novels don’t sell.
But of course they do, provided we don’t call them comic novels and instead focus on the dramatic aspects of the story. When we say something is comic, we’re saying you’ve been brought to the text to be made to laugh and be entertained in a particular way. Margo delivers those entertainments, but it has others as well, as do most novels which used to be labeled as “comic.”
Kevin: I read many novels for the ToB completely blind, not knowing anything about them in terms of tone or plot. But Margo is titled like a comic novel, and its cover art is consistent with a comic novel, and so that was my expectation going in and I was quite satisfied.
John: The demands of “realism” in a comic novel are, arguably, lower than other types of novels, but at least while I was reading Margo, I didn’t have to give any latitude in terms of believing what was on the page. Thorpe is a very deft writer, so it felt like we were in good hands all along.
Kevin: My lack of expectations threw me a bit with The Extinction of Irena Rey. To be honest, I felt a little unmoored as I started reading and I don’t think I ever recovered. I could feel many of the meta aspects of it whizzing past me. That’s on me as a reader. It’s like all the grandmothers who watched Anora with their grandchildren the day after the Oscars. Sometimes doing a little work ahead of time isn’t a bad idea.
John: As Judge Loren observes, it’s interesting that both novels are rather “meta,” with The Extinction of Irena Rey being moreso, as the meta aspects of the book are the steak while in Margo they are the seasoning. It’s interesting to note that the meta aspects of the novel are also somewhat sublimated in how the book is positioned in the marketplace, with “thought provoking” serving as the euphemism for a book that’s going to require you to work through some “puzzles” in Judge Loren’s framing.
My sentiments run in the opposite direction in terms of the judgment, but such are the ways of the ToB.
Kevin: Because this is the end of the semifinals, this is also the last chance for a novel that’s been knocked out in an earlier match to sneak back into the competition as a Zombie. And while Margo’s got money troubles, she has no trouble amassing enough reader votes to wrestle her way back into the Tournament.
The Zombie Round starts tomorrow with what has to be March’s most mellifluous matchup as Martyr! meets Margo’s Got Money Troubles. Then on Friday, a resurrected (and reimagined) James will take on The Extinction of Irena Rey.
Today’s mascot
Nominated by Maggie, please welcome Atlas, Freyja, and Minerva as today’s mascots!
If you’re interested in nominating a pet as a mascot for this year’s Tournament of Books, contact us for more details. (Please note, this is a paid program.)