The New Me is a depressing novel. It’s about a depressed young American woman called Millie, who works in a depressing temp job, while spiralling into even greater depression at the prospect that the job might become permanent. It is also bleakly funny: “I think I’m drawn to temp work for the slight atmospheric changes,” Millie writes. “The new offices and coworkers provide a nice illusion of variety. Like how people switch out their cats’ wet food from Chicken to Liver to Sea Bass, but in the end, it’s all just flavored anus.”
Butler’s debut, Jillian, also used the office as a backdrop. Such a setting could be considered brave for a novelist: most jobs are tedious, to complain at length about how tedious they are can be even more so. Nor, in these precarious times, is the “I hate my job” lament in short supply. Yet the generation that graduated into a recession has also been sold the lie that you have to “love what you do”. How to square that with the monotonous pointlessness of most office work? Butler paints it as a kind of spiritual death: “Back at my desk I sit and slowly collect money that I can use to pay the rent on my apartment and on food so that I can continue to live and continue to come to this room and sit at this desk and slowly collect money.”
Her coping mechanisms are alcohol, back-to-back episodes of true-crime TV, deadpan humour and delicious hostility. Of an obnoxious colleague: “I fold my hands in my lap and re-create him in my mind … his young girlfriend’s jaw setting compulsively when she smells his breath, his father’s dying words (I wish you had been less of a dick) …”
Millie is from the now well-established school of the privileged antiheroine. She is not quite as loathsome as Ottessa Moshfegh’s protagonist in My Year of Rest and Relaxation, though her parents pay for her apartment and she is a horrible snob, tearing down an acquaintance for using “utilise” in conversation (“it’s a real first-gen-college-grad kind of word, like your parents are small-town conservative Christians who didn’t have any books in the house”). When the reader starts to feel compassion for Millie, it feels like a literary feat. That place of tension between the expectations of privilege and the colourless reality of life in an advanced service economy is fertile territory for art and comedy. Capitalism makes people behave odiously, the office becoming a backdrop for petty acts of psychopathy, revenge and narcissism, but opting out, or trying to, comes at a price. It’s the only reality we know. And that is a depressing thought.
• Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett’s The Tyranny of Lost Things is published by Sandstone. The New Me is published by Orion (£8.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
