books

Thirty-year-old Millie is a long-term temp at a Chicago interior design firm, where she answers an unringing phone for twelve dollars an hour under the nominal supervision of Karen, a senior receptionist who dislikes her almost immediately. Her days blur into a grey rhythm of microwaved Lean Cuisines, true-crime binges, and vague, perpetually unenacted self-improvement plans: the yoga class she'll sign up for, the apartment she'll finally clean, the whole new person she might, one day, become. When the prospect of a permanent position floats into view, it arrives with the dawning, paralysing suspicion that the life she's been rehearsing for isn't actually worth having.

Butler is devastatingly precise about the texture of low-grade corporate existence. The performance of competence, the passive-aggressive micro-aggressions over photocopier etiquette, the wellness-culture platitudes layered over genuine despair - it's all rendered in a voice so acidic it practically eats through the page. Millie's interior monologue is the novel's chief pleasure: a running commentary of withering judgments on coworkers, friends, family, and herself, occasionally interrupted by chapters in close third person from the people around her, who turn out to be just as unmoored as she is. The shift in perspective is a quietly clever structural move. Millie imagines herself the lone sane observer in a room full of phonies, when in fact everyone is equally lost, equally performing.

Comparisons to Ottessa Moshfegh's work and the film Office Space are hard to resist, and the novel earns them. There is a Bartleby-ish quality to Millie's refusals, a blankness that feels both symptomatic and strangely principled. Butler resists the temptation to soften her with epiphany or arc. There is no redemption here, no yoga-pants glow-up, just a slow, managed descent into whatever the opposite of reinvention is.

The book is not without its irritants. The plot, such as it is, amounts to a sustained deflation, which will reward readers attuned to tone and repel those who want momentum. Millie's financial precarity is more rhetorical than real - her parents underwrite her with such uncomplaining generosity that her predicament starts to feel less like systemic entrapment than a failure of nerve, which complicates the book's millennial-solidarity credentials. There is a wasted chapter about neighbours complaining of bad smells that reads like padding, and the late pivot toward something resembling a moral is clumsier than anything else in the novel. Millie could plausibly have sought help, talked to someone, done any number of small things the book pointedly denies her, and its refusal to imagine even the possibility of growth will strike some as bracing and others as a cop-out.

Still, for a slim, unlovely book about a life going nowhere, The New Me is remarkably hard to put down. It is funny in the worst and truest way - the way your own worst thoughts are funny at 2am - and it lands its small, mean insights with unsettling accuracy. A deadpan miniature of the late-capitalist workplace that sees through its own protagonist as clearly as it sees through everyone else.