The New Me

I ordered Halle Butler's The New Me before I even finished Jia Tolento's excellent review (Halle Butler’s “The New Me” Is an Office Novel for a Precarious Age) in the New Yorker.  Having just left my own toxic work environment.  A " late-capitalist nightmare"?  Sign me up!  Although, actually, don't.  Butler's novel is so bitingly caustic I had to put it aside for a few days, still feeling raw from my own experience.  So, read this when you're in a reasonably sane place, emotionally, because Millie, a millennial working "temp-to-perm" is not-so-slowly loosing her mind while trying to find permanent work, a loving companion ("really I would take anyone" she says), and, most wily of all: Happiness.

With only one horrible friend, a woman with "easily interpretable facial spasms", who clearly keeps Millie around to feel better about herself and a boring, low-paying temp job working for a woman eager to be the most dominant person in the room, there are no female heroes in this story (no male ones either).  The creeping ills of capitalism infest Millie's world.  "In the copy room, she bends down and brings out a small document shredder and pushes it toward me with her foot. She looks at me like I know what this means, like she's shown me the lord's chamber pot and I'm supposed to understand."

Butler's book definitely skewers capitalism, but I was left wondering whether or not this book is a satire.  (My working theory is that Americans have a hard time recognizing satire or maybe just me and like literally everyone I know?)  Eager to find out, I read a couple of interviews with Butler - while insightful, they did not answer my question, although, I'm not sure it matters that much.  Millie's experience is occasionally dreamlike and she frequently veers toward the Untrustworthy Narrator but what she experiences as a character is what many American workers go through on a daily basis: the indignities of low paying jobs and the soul-crushing experience of trying to make a life when you're exhausted at the end of the working day.

The New Me is not only a great addition to the annals of literature about "work" but also really captures the experience of some/many women struggling to find their way in life.  

Milkman by Anna Burns

We were lucky enough to go to London a couple of months ago and one of the top items on my shopping list, aside from some sweet Harry Potter swag was a paperback copy of Milkman by Anna Burns - winner of the Man Booker (2018) and shortlisted for the Orange Prize (aka Women's Prize for Fiction) and a whole bunch of other awards.

The first chapter is (sh)amazing.  Nay, the first sentence is amazing, and almost (spoiler alert) spoils the whole book. "The day Somebody McSomebody put a gun to my breast and called me a cat and threatened to shoot me was the same day the milkman died."  The main character, who is never named

goes on to explain that this guy called the milkman was trying to insinuate himself in her life. "I didn't know whose milkman he was. He wasn't our milkman. I don't think he was anybody's. He didn't take milk orders. There was no milk about him. He didn't ever deliver milk. Also, he didn't drive a milk lorry." (That's page two.)

I'm spelling this out because this is one of those new fangled, old-fashioned books that isn't very plot driven.  Basically, that's the plot: the milkman tries to ingratiate himself, he's eventually shot and Somebody McSomebody sticks a gun in her breast.  And yet, it is 350 pages of beautiful English language about life in Northern Ireland during "The Troubles".  Occasionally it veers into the territory of how when women band together, they can accomplish amazing things (like momentarily put an end to street violence that overtakes a town or help a girl out in the 'Ladies)

and occasionally how women do awful things to each other, by creating and prolonging misery just to have a moment of power in their otherwise powerless lives.  Or they're so beat down by a paternalistic, patronizing community that they themselves maintain the very power structures that are detrimental to their lives and happiness.

Milkman was difficult to read, I ain't gunna lie. The chapters are like 50 pages long, there's a new paragraph only about every three pages, it was about a time that I don't know that much about, and, did I mention no one in the book is called by their name?  There's Maybe-boyfriend, the Milkman, of course, then the actual Milkman (who delivers milk), first sister, second sister, First-Brother-in-Law through Third, and the Wee Sisters, who are actually three very charming younger sisters, and many, many others.  Actually, the names are not a problem, I loved that aspect, and Burns is brilliant about how she helps the reader maintain the thread with this large family.  Despite the challenges, it was a really rewarding book to read, and my copy is now full of underlined, insightful phrases, things to look up, definitions of words I didn't know.

There are a lot of themes that run through this book but one of the major ones is that people who live in war zones are traumatized.  It sounds simple, but, unfortunately, think of what a huge population of this earth lives in violent communities.  Not only is it hard/impossible to invest in society/arts/humanity as a whole, but the trauma to the individual is a heavy burden that's nearly impossible to overcome.  Maybe-boyfriend says, "It's that you don't seem alive anymore. I look at your face and it's as if your sense organs are disappearing or as if they've already disappeared so that no one gets to connect with you."  Or, as Jonathan Van Ness might say it:

SO!  Where does all this leave us?  A challenging book, not plot driven, let's face it: a very depressing look at a violent place in time that destroyed so many lives (did I mention parts are quite funny?)  I really think this book probably isn't going to be everyone's cup of tea, but it was a journey I'm glad I took.

Eternal Life by Dara Horn

Dara Horn's latest is yet another amazing novel that once again has come out a bit under the radar, much to my surprise.  She's too good to be under the radar!  Eternal Life bears a significant comparison with Kate Atkinson's Life After Life, in which the main character comes to life again after every death she experiences.  Unlike the Atkinson character, however, Rachel was born 2000 years ago in Jerusalem.  Horn's descriptions of 1st century Jerusalem and the life of her young Jewish heroine are rich and exciting, combining what's got to be a ridiculous amount of research and a fertile imagination. 

In the present time, Rachel deals with contemporary issues like figuring out how to die and be reborn when a digital signature might follow her.  This becomes especially difficult after her granddaughter takes a sample of her DNA without permission.  But some patterns are all too familiar.  A group of ill-informed protestors gather outside her business in New Jersey, an innocuous event to most of her family but a frightful reminder for Rachel. "She could hardly think of a time when it hadn't started this way, with people yelling outside her store."  Rachel has seen it all - the only thing that really surprises her is when a male lover helps out with the housework. 

Like her previous novel, The Guide for the Perplexed, Horn impeccably mixes the seemingly incongruous worlds of slightly futuristic (though plausible) technology with ancient Judaism and makes it look easy. Of course, the hyper-computing of today, with its general goal of collecting data, is not too dissimilar to the goals of Rachel's scribe father, capturing the written word of religious figures of the day.

I love the intellectual challenge Horn's books offer - this book is funny, and sad, and smart.  It's a real treat for the imagination, and as I also do when I read her work, I learned a lot. 

The Optimist's Daughter

Faulkner House.  Image via

When I was in New Orleans last month, I took myself to a couple of bookstores in the French Quarter.  I love visiting bookstores on vacation, they really seem to stick in my mind.  One was Arcadian books, a frickin' tangle of books that felt like an avalanche was going to fall on me at any moment (which is not to say that I didn't love it) and the other was Faulkner House Books, in the same house where William Faulkner lived (both bookstores are near the cathedral). It is small and extremely civilized, it has the size of a fabulous private library, and for a few precious moments I had it to myself until a small crowd of maybe four people came in, making it almost unbearable.  However, I did overhear an amazing exchange between customer and proprietor that went something like this:

"I'm trying to remember the name of an author..."
"Hum me a few bars," she said. How charming is that?
"Well, he's a young man..."
"Black or white?"
"Black..."
and she gestured at a book on the shelf behind her...
"That's him!" 
Amazing.

I picked up a Eudora Welty, looking for something southern and New Orleans-related - The Optimist's Daughter, something I'd never heard of, but was pleasantly surprised to see had won the Pulitzer.  It's a quiet, short (180 pages) book about a woman, Lauren who has returned to her home just outside New Orleans while her dad has surgery. She's been living in Chicago after attending the Art Institute (hey, just like me!).  Her dad has married a young woman, maybe the same age or younger than Lauren, who's not as sophisticated or respected as Lauren's deceased mother. Her dad dies unexpectedly, and Lauren goes through the funeral and goes home, The End.  I could really relate to the hospital and funeral scenes, in which people say and do stupid things, but Lauren just suffers through.  Actually, Welty gives few details about Lauren's interiority and I was really struck by how little access I had to the main character's interior voice and thoughts. Lately I've mostly been reading contemporary literature and it was a real change to experience something written 40 years ago.  I've read most of the Pulitzer Prize winning fiction books since the 90s and I was really quite surprised that this ostensibly simple narrative tale won in 1973.  It's amazing how literature tastes have changed in the last half century.  But, actually, it wasn't a simple story, after some reflection. As Lauren floats through encounters with her hometown community, they prattle on around her and she says very little. What made it fun as a reader was to imagine how Lauren might have felt about the absurd things people were saying because she was too polite or tired to respond.  It's with a deft and delicate hand that Welty wrote this little novel, a real pleasure to read.