Part modern fairytale, part existentialist thriller, this is a breathtaking joyride of a novel for the summer
If the job market hadn't been so bleak during that long, humid summer, Josephine might have been discouraged from taking the administrative position in a windowless building in a remote part of town.
As the days inch by and the files stack up, Josephine feels increasingly anxious in her surroundings - the drone of keyboards echoes eerily down the long halls, her boss has terrible breath, and there are cockroaches in the bath of her sub-let. When one evening her husband Joseph disappears and then returns, offering no explanation as to his whereabouts, her creeping unease shifts decidedly to dread.
Both chilling and poignant, this novel asks the biggest questions about marriage and fidelity, birth and death. Helen Phillips twists the world we know and shows it back to us full of meaning and wonder - luminous and new.
Helen Phillips is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer's Award, the Italo Calvino Prize and more. She is the author of the widely acclaimed The Beautiful Bureaucrat. Her debut collection And Yet They Were Happy was named a notable book by The Story Prize. Her work has appeared in Tin House, Electric Literature, and The New York Times. An assistant professor of creative writing at Brooklyn College, she lives in Brooklyn with her husband and children.
This was not enjoyable. I only finished it because it was less than 200 pages long and I was stuck at the hair salon. It felt like the author was trying to be inspired by classic dystopian novels (without ever being clear if this book is actually a dystopia) and spinning in some weirdness to be interesting, and none of it worked for me. To make things worse, the main character is the sort whose whole life is wrapped up in her husband and she doesn't care about having friends because she has "the love of her life."
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