Any book that's hailed as existential immediately grabs my attention. I enjoy seeing characters struggle with the same questions I have, hoping their course of action could mirror my own in coming to terms with life. Due to the nature of existential works, though, the protagonists rarely find ways out of their misery that don't involve death. Such is life.
Despite this, I still devour depressing books on the regular, but Halle Butler's The New Me really sent me into a spin. Thirty-year-old Millie works as a temp for a furniture design company called Lisa Hopper. She spends her days checking her email, answering the phones to redirect calls to other departments, and shredding old documents. Needless to say, she hates it, along with the boring, 20-something-year-old women who work there.
When Millie isn't at work, she's at home, making herself meals from scraps (most notably, the last swipes of peanut butter scraped from the near-empty jar), binge drinking, and watching Forensic Files. She has one friend, Sarah, whom she hates. Sarah doesn't really like Millie either, but they content themselves with their mutual hatred for each other.
When Millie receives an email from her temp agency, she thinks she'll be promoted to full-time at Lisa Hopper. Isn't this what she wanted? A stable routine, a solid income? With her impending promotion on the horizon, Millie sets about "self-improvement." She purchases fresh produce from InstaCart, orders new clothes online, signs up for yoga classes, and cleans her apartment, even putting an old piece of gum from the floor onto her pillow to mimic the mints of fancy hotels. When she gets the position, she's convinced she'll be a new person, a better person, someone with it all figured out.
Yet Millie's plans don't exactly come to fruition, and she struggles from job to job, finally gaining acceptance, if not contentment, of a life void of anything with meaning.
This novel explores the modern workplace and workforce, shallow friendships, the lies we're sold about things that will make us happier (new clothes, fresh food, a stable income), and the reality of settling into a society so boring it makes you want to throat-punch someone.
This book was wholly depressing. While Ottessa Moshfegh's similar read (My Year of Rest and Relaxation) ends with a movement towards a new life and way of thinking, Millie remains in her situation, content with her boring office job and making no changes to her life besides upgrading from her temp job to a full-time position. This same resignation and submitting to "the system" reminds me of the ending of 1984 by George Orwell, and these types of endings, while wholly realistic, fill me with utter despair (probably because I am more like Millie than I'd like to believe).
6/10 📕