Review by New York Times Review
EDGAR ALLAN POE'S unnamed narrator in "The Man of the Crowd" sits in a coffee shop referred to as "D," looking toward the street and its never-ending stream of passing strangers. At nightfall, amid the multitude, he spots a man who absorbs his attention. He decides to pursue him, until at last the sun begins to rise again and the narrator realizes that he has been following nothing but a man of the crowd - a man, the reader suspects, who mirrors the narrator in his banal pursuit of others and in his incapacity for being alone. Alexandra Kleeman's brilliant and disturbing debut novel, "You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine," is a fine heir to the tradition inaugurated by Poe, though others will undoubtedly compare her to Pynchon. Narrator A has a roommate called B and a boyfriend called C. A leads an empty, almost ghostly life. Wondering why the aloof C always plays porn videos while they have sex, she hypothesizes: "He was thickening the moment by laying fantasy upon reality upon fantasy. Any two people stuck to each other in the present made for a wasteland." The only antidote for that wasteland is television - the constant, reliable company of that "device casting light and movement," that box filled with strangers whose lives A, B and C pursue every day from the sofa. In many ways, Kleeman has written a non-nostalgic elegy to television, a technology that may soon become obsolete, reduced to a familiar background hum. Curiously, there are few references to the Internet and social networks in "You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine" - a novel ultimately about losing touch with ourselves and other people as we become increasingly caught inside the web of our prosthetic electronic souls, replacing things in our lives with proxies, our loved ones with avatars. Here it is television, rather than the Internet, that marks one's sense of belonging and non-belonging in a world subject to a constant "ghosting process." Roommate B looks a lot like A, "both petite, pale and prone to sunburn." They watch commercials and eat Popsicles, so much "more like color than food" that they can burn the calories "just by eating them with vigor." Their relationship begins to sour when B cuts off her braid and gives it to A. Without her braid, B now resembles A even more closely, and A begins to suspect that she - A - is being dispossessed of her identity. She turns to C, whose favorite program is about sharks and what they eat. Together A and C watch television, and sometimes have sex. (The way sexuality is dealt with is viciously sharp and often hilarious: An imaginary orgy is described as an event in which everyone suddenly starts "stripping down" and fornicating "very politely.") One day, A and C watch a program about a man who, out of "parental protectiveness" for doomed calves as well as an "aimless hunger," bought all the veal from his local supermarket, hoarding the cutlets in his refrigerator until there was no space - at which point he began to eat them. ("I couldn't do anything for the calves," he says, "but I thought to myself: I can do something for these cutlets.") A becomes obsessed with this story and eventually joins a sect that preaches against the consumption of "matter that is improperly sourced." Here, the novel becomes a kind of 21st-century dystopia. The sect's members, called Eaters, perform collective purging rituals, depriving themselves of real food. When she was a child, A explains, she was obsessed with the food chain, drawing predator-prey relations on all her notebooks, "big webs" in which she was always featured in a topmost corner. Hunger is the thread that stitches this novel together: spiritual and emotional, but also plain, physical hunger. In a society of spectacle, in a culture that is starving itself to extinction by replacing life with its on-screen simulacrum - at one point, the characters move "like children on a swing set, but not children, and no swing set" - man becomes the predator of man. "You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine" is a powerful allegory of our civilization's many maladies, artfully and elegantly articulated, by one of the young wise women of our generation. VALERIA LUISELLI is the author of the novel "Faces in the Crowd." Her second novel, "The Story of My Teeth," will appear this month.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [September 6, 2015]
Review by Booklist Review
Kleeman offers a bizarre world closely mapped to our own anxieties in this debut novel. In A's apartment the television glows constantly with images of cartoon mascot Kandy Kat selling Kandy Kakes (catchphrase: Real Stuff. Real Good). Between commercials, A spends her time in meditation on consumption. Her psyche is filled with the products in Wally's Food Foyer, the visceral, fleshy preparation of meals in the kitchen, and the physical absorption of food within her body. A's corporal obsessions are paralleled by those of her roommate, B, a doppelgänger prone to biting, and her boyfriend, C, an armchair psychologist addicted to reality television and pornography. Together, this triad journeys into an increasing surreal space of consumerist religious cults, a show about stealing veal, and body dysmorphia. Kleeman's absurdist observations evoke masters like Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon, as well as the hysterical realism of Ben Marcus and Tom Perrotta, bringing a refreshingly feminist frame to the postmodern conversation. While the novel is ambitious in scope and structure, sharp humor and brisk storytelling ground the existential angst in Kleeman's page-turning. entertaining performance.--Bosch, Lindsay Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Kleeman's debut novel is a fever dream of modern alienation following A, a young woman living in an unnamed city with B, her roommate, who has a tendency to bite people when she feels cornered. A has a boyfriend, C, who makes things "suddenly, instantaneously normal, just by explaining them." But A's dull proofreading job and her idle time spent watching Shark Week and porn with C start fading away, and events grow increasingly hallucinatory as B begins trying to look more like A (including cutting off her braid and giving it to A), and C becomes more distant. This is a world in which a man buys a supermarket's entire stock of veal, and something called Disappearing Dad Disorder runs rampant. But the strange becomes increasingly ordinary as it's filtered through A's quest to efface herself: "I looked forward to fully becoming my own ghost, which I had been told would resemble nothing and would look uniquely like itself." In the third act, a religious cult in which members wear ghostlike sheets takes center stage; members subsist entirely on a synthetic dessert snack called Kandy Kakes and are instructed to "misremember" (erase their own memories through meditative concentration). Kleeman's story is not really like any other, but could be described as a blend of the nightmarish disassociation of DeLillo's White Noise and the phantasmagoria of Bergman's Persona. It's a testament to Kleeman's ability that the text itself blurs and begins to run together-that it seems composed more of a uniform, ephemeral language than of a series of discrete scenes. This is a challenging novel, but undoubtedly one with something to say. One wonders what Kleeman will come up with next. Agent: Claudia Ballard, WME Entertainment. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Identity, abjection, and consumerism are the primary concerns of this debut novelist. A is worrying that she and her roommate, B, are becoming indistinguishable. A's problem with her boyfriend, C, is an inversion of the aforementioned dilemma: what C sees when he looks at A is what he wants A to bewhat she wants herself to be, but only sometimes, and not so much lately. Kleeman is, clearly, writing in a postmodernist mode. Her ambition is huge, and, at the level of the sentence, she's amazing. "I had hoped happiness would be warmer, cozier, more enveloping. More exciting, like one of the things that happen on TV to TV people instead of the calming numb of watching it happen." Those are terrific sentences, and there's writing just like that on nearly every page. At the narrative level, though, this novel barely moves. Even after A joins a discount-store cult, her crises and epiphanies are pretty much repetitionsoccasionally gorgeous repetitions, to be fairof those that have come before. Existential paralysis is a great subject for short fiction but a more difficult one for a novel. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
