Review by New York Times Review
IN THE OPENING pages of Camus's "The Stranger," a nurse warns Meursault to keep a steady pace during his mother's funeral procession: "If you go slowly," she says, "you risk getting sunstroke. But if you go too fast, you work up a sweat and then catch a chill inside the church." Meursault's response conveys his overwhelming, and baffling, sense of imprisonment: "She was right. There was no way out." It's an illustrative moment of the paralysis - damned if I do, damned if I don't - that characterizes so much of existential literature: Vladimir and Estragon, waiting for a God who never shows; the man from the country in the parable told by the priest in Kafka's "The Trial," inert, cursing his fate and praying to fleas, waiting for the doorkeeper to admit him into the Law; Gregor Samsa, trapped between identities, unable to leave his house or return to his human condition. This existential paralysis emerges, in part, from spiritual crisis: If God is dead, what is the individual's role in an essentially meaningless universe? Are we pawns in the thrall of bureaucratic (Kafka) or totalitarian (Orwell) systems? Or are we, in fact, the ones with ultimate power; the arbiters - even unknowingly - of life and death? Helen Phillips deftly interrogates this existential divide in her riveting, drolly surreal debut novel, "The Beautiful Bureaucrat." Five years into their marriage, Josephine Newbury (from whose point of view the novel is told) and Joseph Jones move from the suburban "hinterland" to an unnamed city resembling Brooklyn, where Joseph has secured an administrative job. After 19 months of unemployment, Josephine is desperate to find work herself. The couple also want to have a baby. The novel opens with a job interview, which takes place in a concrete building spanning blocks and labeled with the letters A and Z. A faceless, genderless person - Josephine's boss, known only as the "Person With Bad Breath" - asks a series of eerily inappropriate questions: "You wish to procreate?" "Does it bother you that your husband has such a commonplace name?" The P.W.B.B. leads her down a long hallway (Josephine notices "a sound like many cockroaches crawling behind the closed doors") to a "pinkish box of a room" with a computer monitor and stack of gray files. The P.W.B.B. gives her an identification number for login purposes, HS89805242381, and instructs her to open a file, crosscheck the name and HS number, then input a date from the printed form into the database. The form itself is an indecipherable series of numbers, letters and symbols. When Josephine points out a discrepancy in the date she's supposed to enter - it's tomorrow's date, not today's - the P.W.B.B. responds, obliquely, "Place the file in Outgoing," then warns her not to discuss her work with anyone, including her husband. And that is that. Josephine is now - or will become, with her "good skin, good eyes" (again, out-of-line remarks from the P.W.B.B.) - a Beautiful Bureaucrat. Or so we think. Beneath the Sisyphean task of data entry there's another mechanism at work, and Phillips's thrillerlike pacing and selection of detail as the novel unfolds is highly skilled. When Josephine's husband disappears - twice - and returns "home" (the couple continually move from sublet to sublet) with no explanation, Josephine begins to suspect he's hiding something. She wonders if he's having an affair with her blond co-worker Trishiffany ("My parents couldn't pick between Trisha and Tiffany"), who calls Josephine "Jojo doll" and speaks in exclamation points. She also has "disproportionately large breasts," wears bubble-gum pink and emits a "candy fragrance." She and the Person With Bad Breath seem to appear out of nowhere at the very moments Josephine is off-task; I was reminded of the thought police in "1984" and our own post-Snowden awareness of governmental surveillance, as well as the "you create your own reality" credo of New Age books like "The Secret" - the quantum, symbiotic balance between thought and reality. "Remember," the boss tells Josephine, "you need the Database as much as the Database needs you!" The existential pawn-versus-power divide is a theological one as well: Are humans automatons, predestined for salvation or damnation, or do they have free will? Phillips makes much of the attendant Judeo-Christian symbology. After Joseph comes home and, inexplicably, hands his wife a pomegranate (an inversion of the Genesis story, "Adam" giving "Eve" the forbidden fruit, as well as a nod to Persephone), he tells her he's secured a "garden apartment" for their next sublet. Hillary, a chipper waitress with a "green snake" tattoo on her arm, tells Josephine's fortune; Josephine immediately feels "naked, ashamed, far too understood." The movement from sublet to sublet begins to feel like a descent into hell - complete with Cerberus - that is, simultaneously, a twisted return to Eden. However, I often felt the symbols were trying too hard. The pomegranate enters, deus ex machina; on second read, it's clearly and a bit clumsily placed as a catalyst for what happens next. Josephine's office number is 9997, which is to say an inverted 666 followed by the "perfect" divine number 7 - again, a perhaps too easy tie to the thematic divisions between God and Satan, good and evil. Even Trishiffany's name ("Trisha means 'a patrician' in Latin, and Tiffany means 'manifestation of God' in Greek," she tells Josephine) seems an overly clever bureaucracy/God dichotomy. The characters, too, can feel generic, even cutesy at times. Hillary bellows, hustles and bustles around the restaurant, delivering food "quickly, with a wink"; Trishiffany yelps ecstatically, smiles dazzlingly, coos, parades in, purrs and chortles; in a single phone call with her husband, Josephine demands, screams and shrieks; she smiles "a thin, scornful smile at her nervous little self"; she beelines and scurries nearly everywhere: to the bathroom, down the long hallway, back to her files. Though this is a parabolic novel - working within the tradition of symbolic figures and situations - some less excitable verbs would have served the author's style, as would the upending of readers' expectations. What if the nameless, faceless boss were the one who smelled like candy, the pink-suited blonde the one with bad breath? STYLE ASIDE, WHAT makes "The Beautiful Bureaucrat" a unique contribution to the body of existential literature is its trajectory, as the story telescopes in two directions, both outward to pose macro questions about God and the universe, and inward to pose intimate inquiries about marriage and fidelity. Regarding the former, it becomes apparent that the bureaucrats themselves - Trishiffany and the P.W.B.B. - function as stand-ins for a kind of deity. Trishiffany speaks of the couple's "many transgressions" and (mis) quotes Julian of Norwich, "But all shall be well and all shall be well and all shall be well" ("...and all manner of thing shall be well" is the famous original). If there is a God/bureaucrat working behind the scenes, is she or he for us, against us or indifferent? Are the powers-that-be benevolent, malevolent or somewhere in between? "Oh, don't thank me," the P.W.B.B. says. "There's nothing benevolent here either. I'm not doing favors, I'm doing paperwork. Getting all the ducks in a row." But even as the novel probes this macro idea, it asks a smaller-scale question: Can we ever really know another individual, including a spouse? How much is hidden, how much revealed? Josephine's paralysis and her often maddening inability to act - the first time her husband goes missing she waits 24 hours before calling anyone; she doesn't go to the post office to investigate a series of notes about a mysterious package; doesn't question her own job, or her husband's; she says, echoing Bartleby the Scrivener, "she would prefer not to do this" - is fitting within the tradition of existential crisis. The reader's unrest also mirrors Josephine's frustration with her husband's disappearances, her meaningless job and her inability to become pregnant: procreation, in many ways, the linchpin upon which the novel hinges, genesis in a literal sense. Readers on either side of the abortion debate (and animal rights advocates) will find rich discussion material in the startling, enigmatic ending. Ultimately, "The Beautiful Bureaucrat" succeeds because it isn't afraid to ask the deepest questions. What is the balance of power and powerlessness between two people who love each other? Do individual souls matter? Can we create, should we destroy, and can we always tell the difference? 'You need the Database,' the heroines boss says, 'as much as the Database needs you.' JAMIE QUATRO is the author of the story collection "I Want to Show You More." A novel and a second collection are forthcoming.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 9, 2015]
Review by Booklist Review
Josephine moves to the city with her husband in hopes of finding a job, but a hostile market makes it hard to find work even in a bustling metropolis. Finally, on the day they are evicted from their apartment, she lands a successful interview. Her new position, entering numbers into The Database from a tiny, windowless office, isn't ideal, but it does come with a regular paycheck and the promise of a more secure future. It's not long, though, before the job begins to gnaw at her, and it's not just the bleary eyes and tedium engendered by the work. Her husband also seems a little off, failing to come home some nights and offering only cryptic explanations. As Josephine probes deeper, she uncovers an unnerving truth and realizes that if she doesn't take action, she could lose all she holds dear. Phillips' first novel is peculiar, mysterious, and intriguing, bringing to mind the visceral symbolism of Margaret Atwood's dystopian works. Clever wordplay toys with readers while hinting at a deeper commentary on the meaning of life.--Ophoff, Cortney Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Phillips's (And Yet They Were Happy) novel incisively depicts the corporate hell in which young drones toil in faceless buildings, sorting meaningless files according to inscrutable policies. Josephine Anne Newbury takes a data-entry job and finds she can't quite leave her work at the office; her husband and friends suddenly seem less real than Room 9997, where Josephine compiles a mysterious and massive database that seems to dictate reality itself, while warding off Trishiffany, her workplace "frenemy" from the so-called Department of Processing Errors. Discovering that she can't quit-the rules don't allow it-and realizing that she never caught her direct superior's name, Josephine wonders if she's losing her mind, fears she's somehow pregnant by data, then becomes convinced of her husband's imminent demise because a file contains the date of his death. In fact, things are much worse than Josephine suspects. When even the smallest act requires allocation to the appropriate department and red tape dictates the limits of love, the life of a bureaucrat proves to be full of danger. Phillips's black comedy of white-collar life doesn't reinvent the meaning of the word Kafkaesque, and to its credit, it doesn't try. The novel has enough horror and mordant humor to carry the reader effortlessly through its punchy send-up of entry-level institutionalization. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Phillips's debut (after the collection And Yet They Were Happy) tells of a seemingly meaningless clerical job in a faceless building in a big city that is gradually revealed to have consequences worthy of a Twilight Zone episode. Josephine is relieved finally to get a data-entry position after many months of unemployment, even though her nameless boss has rotten breath, her miniscule, windowless office has suspicious smudges on the walls, and the other employees appear to be nonexistent. The days she spends entering numbers onto endless forms are a stable counterpoint to the peripatetic living situation she shares with her husband, Joseph. Evicted from one sublet after another, the couple is sustained by love, sharing frugal candlelit meals on the floor. Gradually, Joseph's sudden late-night absences combined with the tedium and isolation of Josephine's job cause her to look under the surface of mundane events and discover the shocking mechanism that lies beneath. VERDICT Suspenseful, creepy, and distinct, this work is sparse in style but elaborate in wordplay. For readers who like their literary fiction with a side of sf. [See Prepub Alert, 2/23/15.]-Joy -Humphrey, Pepperdine Univ. Law Lib., Malibu, CA © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
In a novel that's part love story, part urban thriller, Phillips (And Yet They Were Happy, 2011, etc.) captures the way an isolating job and an indifferent city can stealthily steal our lives and erode our soulsand the protective, nourishing power of love. A nameless, genderless, nearly faceless boss with rank breath; a tiny office in a vast windowless building, its "pinkish ill-colored" walls fluorescently lit, marked with "scratches, smears, shadowy fingerprints, the echoes of hands" of bureaucrats past, and impervious to efforts at beautification; the incessant, maddening drone of typing; the red-eyed co-workers of uncertain trustworthiness; the computer database into which numbers on pages in piles of files must be entered and double-checked and processed just sothese are the things Josephine Anne Newbury encounters in the administrative job she accepts, asking few questions and getting fewer answers, for a mysterious organization. Having up and moved to the city from the "hinterland" looking for new opportunities, Josephine and her beloved husband, Joseph, endure mindless work following a long period of unemployment and the added alienation of living in unwelcoming apartments, surrounded by other people's belongings. They find solace, joy, and vitality in each other, in the linguistic playfulness that has become their own language, in the warm glow of simple meals enjoyed together by candlelight, and in their shared dream of starting a family. But the city to which they have moved "in hope of hope" sweeps them into its sinister clutches and brings them face to face with pressing existential questions to which the answers may be as inevitable and unpleasant as they are unclear. Phillips takes situations and sentiments that will be all too familiar to many readersa soul-crushingly dull job that callously steals our youth and beauty, the desperate yearning to be free of it, the restoring power of love and food and intimacy and of shared language and laughterand uses them to explore bigger universal themes of life and death and the choices and compromises they demand. Intense and enigmatic, tense and tender, this novel offers no easy answersits deeper meanings may mystifybut it grabs you up, propels you along, and leaves you gasping, grasping, and ready to read it again. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
